


Flying To Wyoming II: Miles To Go

by R_W_Daniels



Series: Flying To Wyoming [3]
Category: The Last of Us
Genre: Action/Adventure, Age Difference, Apocalypse, Awkward Adolescent Feelings, Bathing/Washing, Complete, Drama, Explicit Language, Friendship/Love, Humor, Lemon, Motorcycles, Multi, Original Character(s), Violence, Weapons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-02-14 08:30:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 282,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2184879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/R_W_Daniels/pseuds/R_W_Daniels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joel and Ellie continue to travel the ruined highways of America, borne along on an old, red motorcycle, searching for Tommy, the younger brother who walked out of Joel’s life six years before. Wyoming gets closer with each mile that passes beneath their wheels, but does Ellie really want to find the Fireflies as much as she did when she began this journey? And does Joel share her growing desire for something more than friendship?</p><p>New updates every Saturday until all thirty chapters are up!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Brass, Smoke, and the Overpass

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story is a continuation of my earlier work, Flying To Wyoming. It contains numerous references to the events of that volume. If you haven’t read that story yet, you should consider doing it just so you’re up to speed and aren’t caught off guard a few paragraphs from now when Ellie whips out a double-barreled shotgun that you don’t remember her having in the game.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 01 – Brass, Smoke, and the Overpass**

 

Ellie’s eyes were fixed on a large blonde dog, sniffing at something she couldn’t see at the edge of an algae-covered spillway off to their right. It looked up at them as they drove by it. They made eye contact. She wondered if it was friendly but knew it was beside the point. They were making good time on this old highway today and Joel wouldn’t stop for anything. Certainly not for a cute dog who might need a friend.

They veered sharply, heading across the shoulder and off the road.

“JESUS, JOEL!”

She clutched him tightly, but her arms weren’t strong enough to maintain their grip as the bike began to go over onto its side. There was a screech of metal and the sharp cracking of plastic as one of the molded saddlebag compartments buckled under the weight of the tumbling Honda and broke apart. She flew off, sailing a short distance and landing on her shoulder. The denim jacket she loved so dearly took as much of the blow as it could and began to shred apart around her as she skidded across the ground. The grass stains would never come out of the white Tim Horton’s shirt that once belonged to Kristi Chau, the woman who had originally owned the motorcycle. Ellie’s head thunked the ground as she flipped over, she saw her legs backlit against the sky briefly, and then everything around her began to tumble end over end as she rolled.

 

* * *

 

She lay facedown in the grass, trying to remember what had happened. There had been a cute dog. It needed a friend. And now there were blades of beautiful green grass pressed against her visor. Several rusted-out cars lay ahead of her, tilted at the same crazy angle as the horizon. She could feel a hard and unpleasant something pressed against her chest. The small part of her mind that wasn’t still doing cartwheels told her ‘shotgun’.

“Ellie!” The name was familiar, the voice distant. She tried to blink the world straight and level, but it refused to behave. The world sucked.

A distant percussive sound, like thunder. The grass in front of her visor leapt up in a lovely dance of grass and mud.

That’s right. It had been raining earlier. Joel had slowed down a bit so they wouldn’t ‘hydroplane’, whatever that was. She remembered them hitting a puddle so large that her feet were swept right off that pegs for a very scary second. She was glad when the rain stopped. Then she had seen the lonely dog.

_He needed me. I’m sure of it._

“Ellie!” Still distant, but closer now. No, that was wrong. It wasn’t any closer, really. It was just louder. Her ears were coming back from their unscheduled lunch break.

_That’ll be Joel. I’m going to give him so much crap for something in a minute... Just as soon as I remember what I’m so darn mad about… Just as soon as I’m ready to get out of my blanket… Five more minutes, I think._

Thunder rumbled again. Guess it was going to rain again soon. The grass in front of her leaped up once more, a bit closer than last time. It was even prettier, so close to her eyes. She reached out to catch it with fingers that only barely understood what to do.

_What the heck is doing that? Gophers? Groundhogs maybe?_

She tried to remember the difference between those animals, but it had been too long since she’d last read her “Animals + You” book. It was a ‘fun-facts’ book for kids, and as much as she loved looking at the pictures and learning about the super cute animals, she didn’t want to read it with Riley around. It was important to be as grownup and cool as possible around Riley, and you couldn’t do that if you were reading kiddie books.

_Oh that’s right. I traded it to that little boy on floor two for those Batman comics. Total gyp. They weren’t the cool, tough Batman comics. They were the cartoony ones for little kids. Barely any violence in them at all. Should have looked at them more closely before I made that crappy deal._

Something was grabbing at her. A large powerful hand clutched at the small of her back, hooking the waistband of her jeans. The world straightened out and began to recede rapidly, the pretty green blades of grass rushing beneath her. Another beautiful poof of grass and mud, right where she had been a moment before. She tried to catch it again, but it was too far away now. She realized that her backpack had slipped from her shoulders.

“Goddammit, Ellie! C’mere!”

“Joel?” The words were muffled inside her helmet, inside her head.

The grassy world turned over to reveal an underbelly of overcast sky and she was looking up at him. Worry was pasted across his lined face. What was he so upset about?

“Ellie? Are you all right?”

“No, Joel!” She heard her voice becoming louder. “You damn near pulled my pants off! What the fuck?”

She reached down to pull her jeans up from around her hips – fuck, he could see her panties and everything! The rope holding her shotgun to her was twisted, binding the gun to her tightly. It was hard to move right. She was embarrassed that he had seen her underwear. She noticed a bright flash of light on the bridge up ahead. Her brain told her ‘muzzle flash’.

“Oh shit, Joel! We’re being shot at! Get behind something!”

But they already were. Joel had seen to that. Even as she fixed her pants, he pulled her closer to him, deeper into the cover provided by a banged-up white car. The bridge was out of sight now. She looked around for the bike and found it laying twenty feet away, beyond the other end of the car, towards the road. The supplies contained in the broken bin were scattered everywhere. For just a moment, she thought about dashing out to collect them or her backpack, but something told her to do it later.

She noticed the long, muddy groove in the grass, realized that it was her body that had carved it into the earth as she slid.

_Fuck me! I must have flown ten or fifteen feet!_

She was oddly proud of this. She couldn’t say why.

“Stay down!” he yelled at her, pushing her back against the safety of the old car. He fired off a few rounds with his semiautomatic pistol in the direction of the bridge. She couldn’t see if he hit anything, but she heard the sound of bullets striking metal.

_Better use the hunting rifle._

She looked around but couldn’t find it anywhere. She took off her helmet and suddenly the world became much louder. There were sporadic gunshots coming from the other side of the car they were huddling behind.

“- a goddamn ambush!” he was saying. “Didn’t see it until it was almost too late! You okay?”

She nodded dumbly. Her brain was just now getting back from wherever it went to a moment ago.

_Get it together, Ellie._

_I’m trying, Brain. But you’re not helping very much._

She knew she needed to be of help to him right now. Focus on that. The rest would come later.

The rope sling of her shotgun was hopelessly kinked. She couldn’t free herself from it. She hated to do it, but she didn’t have time for anything else. She found her switchblade and cut the tangled rope away from her, releasing the shotgun. She looked to Joel as she tossed the twisted loops away.

“Sorry,” she offered weakly, making a pained face.

He nodded, not angry with her for ruining the simple sling he had made for her.

She turned over, came up in a crouch, and risked a peek over the edge of the car. She glimpsed two men on the far right end of the bridge that ran over the highway. They were firing down at them. Another man was poking his head over the edge of the guardrail a bit further in from them. There were several ramshackle constructions scattered across the top of the bridge. Houses of some kind? Were people really living in those things? They reminded her of the sheds she had often seen in the many backyards she and Joel had camped in, but not put together as neatly. Each one seemed to be made from several different sheds.

Before she could puzzle it out, Joel’s hand appeared on the top of her head and pushed her down roughly into safety.

“Stay down, I said!”

“Ow! Fuck! Easy! I was just in a motorcycle wreck, you ass!” she barked as something small and metal whipped through the air over her head and splattered into the thick trench that the Honda had cut into the grass and mud a few feet away.

_Check the shotgun. Whatever is going on out there, you’re going to need to fight._

_Good idea, Brain. Glad to have you back. How was your vacation?_

The gun broke open easily and she eased the halves apart just a little. Two brass shells twinkled hello at her. No damage to her precious baby. That was good. But the hanky with the few remaining extra shells was in one of the saddlebags. She hadn’t wanted them to get soaked in the rain, so she’d put them away for safekeeping.

_Too late to do anything about that now. The bike is way the hell over there. I’ll just have to make do._

The gun closed to with a satisfying ‘ker-chack’. She looked over to Joel, who was returning fire with his pistol again.

Her pistol! Where was her pistol?

She checked her back pockets. The switchblade was still there, but the gun was gone! A quick, panicked sweep of her eyes located it, lying just in front of the car, where Joel had pulled her across the grass. She scrambled for it. Gunfire or not, she had to risk it. Joel had given her that gun. She couldn’t let anything happen to it. He’d never forgive her.

She lunged, hands outstretched, fingers closing around the slide just as Joel seized her by the hem of her tattered jacket and pulled her back to him roughly.

“What the hell are you doing, Ellie?”

She held up the pistol. “I told you! You almost pulled my damn pants off, Joel. It fell out of my pocket! Not my fault!”

He grimaced at her and then fired off the last two bullets in the magazine at the bridge.

She pulled the slide back halfway, to take a look inside, see if a round was chambered. She made sure to keep her finger clear of the trigger, just as he had taught her. The compact Beretta was fully loaded and ready to go. She had the high-capacity magazine stuffed in her jacket pocket. Another, regular-sized magazine was laying out there in the mud somewhere. She would try to find it later. The shotgun was no use at this range, so she propped it against the car, in case these bastards tried to rush their position.

She popped up, fired off four rounds at the men hiding up there. Ducked down again.

She moved close to Joel, ready to fight at his side. He felt her easing close alongside him as he was replacing the spent magazine in his pistol with a fresh one. His last one. He saw her determined face, the little gun ready in her hand.

“Got an idea,” he said.

“Me too. Let’s shoot at those twat waffles!” Was now the time for humor? Hard to tell with Joel. Fuck it, some decisions are just made in the heat of the moment and you have to live with them. This was one of those times.

“We can’t stay here, Ellie. We’re sitting ducks.”

“Where then?”

“See that old Fed-Ex van over there? Up a bit from the bottom of the onramp?”

She looked. The faded words were still prominent on the sides of a largish, slab-sided vehicle. She judged the distance from there to here, noted the complete lack of cover in between. It did not seem promising.

“It’s pretty far away, Joel.”

The shooting had stopped. Were they reloading? Were they out of bullets? Were they preparing to toss firebombs? She shuddered. He was right. They probably shouldn’t stay here.

“I know. But I gotta get over there. I can use the other cars on the onramp for cover and make my way up to the overpass. Once I’m up there, I can flank them. Maybe drive ‘em out.”

“I’ll be right on your tail, Joel.” She began swapping out the regular magazine for the much larger one Joel had given her back in Johnstown. After what had happened on the bridge over the river, she always made sure to keep it handy at all times.

“No. I need you to stay here, Ellie.”

“Fuck that, Joel! I’m not a fucking baby! I can help!” She stuffed the half-empty magazine into her pocket.

“Hey, mister!” The voice was mocking, dripping with some regional accent Ellie had never heard before. “You still down there?”

“Don’t say anything to them, Ellie.” He was checking to make sure his shotgun was loaded with every shell he had on him.

“Fine.” She sounded slightly angry and dejected.

Joel ignored her. Her head was still clearly in the game but this was not the time for that teenager shit. Not in any amount.

“Send up the slit and maybe we’ll let you talk your way outta this! Whaddya say?”

Another voice joined in, hooting “Honest! You can trust us! We’re dying for a good conversation! Ain’t had one in months!”

Laughter burst forth from several men hiding up there.

Ellie was indignant. “Slut? Did they just call me a _slut_? Come on, Joel! Let me shoot these hillbilly assholes!”

She hoped she was using the word ‘hillbilly’ right. She had heard Joel use it the night before, telling her a funny story about the people from the state below this one. This state. That state. Had to be close enough, right?

“Ignore them. I need you to focus.”

“They called me a _slut_ , Joel! _C’mon!_ ” She waggled the pistol to make her point.

_Defend my honor, you big jerk!_

“That’s not what they sai-“ A pause. He had been about to say something but reconsidered and let it go. “Look, I need you to cover me while I make it over to that van. No arguing now!”

_The things I do for you, Joel._

“Alright, alright. Fine,” she grumbled. “Give me the signal.”

“Come on out, lady! We just wanna talk! Ha ha!”

“Yeah! C’mon up here and we’ll talk about the first thing that comes up!”

More catcalls followed.

_What was with these assholes?_

She sensed that some part of the stuff they were saying was going over her head and it pissed her off. She needed a moment to think about it, but there wasn’t time.

“And do it fast, Joel! I’m about to lose my temper with those shit stains.” She wiped her forehead with her left hand pushing her damp, stray bangs out of the way.

Before she could return the hand to her gun, he took her by the wrist and pressed his big .45 semiautomatic pistol into her palm. With wide eyes, she watched him close her fingers around the large grip. They barely managed to contain the girth of it. She raised it up to the level of her other hand and her eyes drank in the sheer spectacular awesomeness of it: Two guns. _At the same time_.

He nodded grimly at her. This was an act of absolute trust and she knew it.

“It’s called suppressin’ fire,” he was saying. “It’s sorta tricky but you can do this.”

A gun in each hand. She had never felt so powerful, not even with her shotgun.

_Oh wow. The hero of Invasion: USA had carried two guns. And he kicked all the ass._

The men on the bridge shouted something else at them. Some bullshit about her showing them her tits or whatever. Ellie found it easy to ignore them now. Sluts didn’t pack this much firepower.

“When I make a break for the van,” Joel was saying, “you cover me. It’s not close, so you have to make them keep their heads down until I get there. Alright?”

Her voice was firm, unwavering. She was surprised at the strength of it. “I’ve so fucking got this, Joel. You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Don’t fire them both at once, or you’ll run dry at the same time and my ass will be left twistin’ in the wind.”

She nodded, paying close attention to his every word.

The assholes on the bridge were calling again. They wanted to know if she could dance. She was about to show them.

“Go to the far end of this car. Keep low. They might not think to look for you over there. I counted four guns between seven men. Focus on the ones with guns. Keep it up, keep it steady, keep it goin’. Buy me the time I need. I’m _countin_ ’ on you, Ellie. Okay?”

Ice was in her words now. “Let’s kick those pussies in the dick, Joel.”

He squeezed her shoulder and sent her on her way.

She crawled low, working her way towards the rear end of the car. Joel checked his shotgun and waited for her to get into position. He popped his head up once to keep them focused on his end of the car. A pair of shots sang through the air and splattered in the mud just beyond the car, bullets meant for him.

“We got all day, asshole! Send the woman out! Now! Then we can talk!”

_God, I haven’t asked you for shit since that night in Boston. Maybe I don’t deserve it. And neither does Joel, I guess. But you owe me. You know you do. If you’re really up there and you really exist, then you fucking owe me. Help me. This time, really help me. The whole world is riding on him getting me to the Fireflies. We can’t die here on this highway, damn it. So get off your ass already and do something for a change, okay?_

She took a deep breath, rested both pistols against her shoulders, and looked at Joel. She was ready. He nodded and began to sprint just as she was standing up.

She held the larger .45 at the ready with her left hand, keeping it near her shoulder until she needed it. Her smaller .32 was in her right hand, seeking the men on the end of the bridge nearest Joel and the van. They were the ones with guns. She saw one aiming a shotgun at Joel, another next to him raising his rifle to do the same.

The compact Beretta bucked in her little hand. Once. Twice. Three times. The men with the guns were caught unaware by the arrival of the fusillade and dove for the asphalt as her bullets struck the guardrails and rusty sheds around them, ricocheting wildly and showering them with sparks. She had a ton of bullets in this thing, and those fuckers up there were welcome to each and every one of them.

From the corner of her eye, she saw another man standing up near the other end of the bridge. He had a cowboy rifle of some sort. His eyes were only for her. He was levering a bullet into his firearm. He was going to take aim at any moment. She could see him smiling.

Still firing in the general direction of the other two, she tried to bring the heavier pistol in her left hand to bear on him, but it was a struggle. The gun was heavy and she wasn’t left-handed. She probably should have switched them before starting this, but it was too late now.

She brought the gun to position as best she could and began to fire at him too. Once. The muzzle flash was much larger than she expected. Twice. The recoil was intense. Both guns were blazing now. This was exactly the thing Joel told her _not_ to do. She knew she had better keep him alive if he was going to be around to yell at her later.

The man who had sought to kill her grabbed his shoulder, staggered forward, almost went over the railing, his lever-action cowboy gun tumbling down to the highway and breaking apart. Impossibly, she had hit him. Another man rushed out to help him, a pistol in his hands. She eased the heavy pistol slightly to the right to account for him. Fired again. Three times. Four. He reconsidered his heroics and abandoned his friend, diving for the cover of an old car when a bullet whistled past his ear. She cut her eyes sharply to focus on the other gun still firing in her right hand. The bullets it was pumping out were sending sparks flying across that end of the bridge too. A fire had broken out. A ricochet had struck something flammable inside a shed. Oily flames climbed out of a crudely fashioned window.

Much later, while being scolded by Joel for something unrelated, she will unexpectedly remember that she was screaming at this point. She had been screaming since she stood up with the guns in her hands. Joel will remember it as a high, shrill, wild animal roar of defiance. Her throat will hurt for the rest of this day.

Bullets bounced off the sheet metal, the steel railing, the concrete foundations, old drums containing who knew what. Sparks flew in all directions. The fire had already spread to another shed. It began to belch smoke. Spent, steaming brass sparkled in the air all around her. The breeze stirred her unruly bangs, keeping them out of her eyes. Everyone up on the bridge had flattened against the asphalt, hands over their heads, trying not to get hit by the caroming bullets bouncing all around them. Underneath the roar of the guns, beyond the sound of her own angry shrieking, she thought she could hear them shouting, cursing.

The small pistol clicked empty, the slide locking back, exhausted of ammo at last. She dropped it without a second thought and brought her strong hand over to help manage the weight of Joel’s unwieldy Colt .45, still firing in her left hand. She held it in a death grip, both hands barely able to contain the size of it. She was still screaming. The gunpowder cloud stung her eyes, lovely green barely showing through slitted lids. The sizzling brass fell to the ground below her, landing in a twinkling metal shower near her basketball shoes. The grass was still wet from the morning rain and droplets of water shimmered in the sunlight around her ankles. The empty Beretta landed with a soft thud between her feet. The rising spray of water from the impact brought a tiny rainbow into existence for half a heartbeat before it evanesced away into nothingness.

The slide on the big .45 locked back. Empty. She remained standing, screaming, defiant. She leaned forward on the balls of her feet, fist clenched, as though her scream itself were a weapon. She wanted to unleash all her pain and anger and loss upon the world in an unconquerable wave of shattering destruction. She wanted them all to die.

Up on the bridge, something in the second burning shed exploded, sending forth a great gout of fire and smoke. It came erupting from the makeshift door and window, sending men scattering in fear of it. The tin roof lifted halfway off, twisting itself almost in two from the blast.

She threw up her arms in a V of victory.

“SUCK MY DICK, YOU COCKSUCKING MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRRRS!!!”

She didn’t recognize her own voice. It was harsh, strained, cracking.

“Jesus Christ!” someone shouted from up there, somewhere, his voice thick with fear. They were all still clinging to the ground; terrified it would start up again. Someone was screaming horribly. Maybe he had been caught in the fire?

_Good._

All at once, she remembered herself, her importance to the world, her hoped-for importance to Joel. She dropped down behind the white car, Joel’s empty, smoking gun clutched in both hands. She was panting, her lungs burning. She felt like she’d sprinted for miles. Her chest heaved as she gulped lungfuls of cold, damp air. Acrid gunsmoke was all around her, filling her hair with the smell of it. Her eyes were wide. All the colors of the world before her seemed brighter than they had ever been. She swiveled her head in the direction of the van. Had she protected him? Was he still alive? Had she done good?

She found him there, almost halfway up the onramp, crouched behind the rusted heap, his big shotgun in his hands. His eyes were fixed on her. He wore a look that she had never seen on his face before.

Astonishment.

Proud of herself, she smiled sweetly at him. Half a heartbeat later, a fearsome hailstorm of bullets and buckshot rained down on her car. Every gun up there was trained on her position. She huddled, making herself as small as possible. For a moment, she remembered her old Snoopy doll and dearly wished that she were holding it like she used to in those lonely nights in the Saint Philomena’s Children’s Home for orphans, where she’d spent the first ten years of her life, much of it with that Snoopy doll that Sister Anne had given her for Christmas when she was four. She’d slept with it every night for the next two years, before that fuckstick Kevin Chiang stole it from her and set it on fire. She had only been six at the time. She pretended that Kevin was up on that bridge somewhere, and that he was about to get what was coming to him.

_All right, Joel. You can take it from here._

Chin tucked against her chest, shoulders drawn up tight around her neck, arms wrapped around her knees, she glanced in his direction again. He was already gone. She couldn’t see him anywhere. She knew that meant he was somewhere where no one was looking, moving in to kill these bastards.

Bullets sang around her, metal whined, glass broke. Mud from a near miss splattered across her face, fouling her cheek and nose. She smiled.

_Have to do better than that, you cockwipes._

The thick mud oozed down her face. She didn’t wipe it away.

War paint.

 _Don’t think for a moment that this makes you and me even, God. You may not be keeping score in this fucked up world anymore, but I still am._ _I haven’t forgotten!_

The firing continued, but the bullets were no longer hurtling in her direction. There were shouts of panic and fear. They were under attack from a new, unexpected direction.

“Joel.”

_He needs me._

She recovered her little pistol, dumping out the empty, oversized clip and shoving the partially loaded spare into the waiting magazine well. The slide snapped closed with a click. She pulled the shotgun to her, cradling it briefly. The pistol only had three rounds in its magazine. There wasn’t time to dig around in her discarded pack for more. The shotgun held the only two available shells she could find at the moment. She looked at Joel’s empty gun. She had no more ammo for it. She left it resting in the wet grass. If there were a later, she would come back here and get it for him. She was good like that.

She crawled to the end of the car where Joel had been moments before and peered over the hood. Joel was on the run, charging the shitty makeshift camp on the bridge, his shotgun in his left hand, held by the pump, his revolver in his right, spitting fire. Bam! Bam! A scream. Bam! Empty! He dropped the pistol and swung the big shotgun up to his empty hand. He had cleared the distance; he was almost at the first smoking shack, where the two armed men had been earlier. It was the perfect range for a gun like that.

_Get ‘em, Joel!_

Thunder. Flame. More screaming. He worked the pump, sending a bright red shell smoking its way through the air. More thunder. More fire. More smoking crimson casings tumbling down from the bridge above. More screams.

She wanted to watch him do this all day. It was exhilarating. But she knew his fortune could change at any moment. Luck was like that, he insisted. She took a deep breath and dashed for the van as fast as she could.

_Follow his lead. Stay out of his line of fire. Stay in cover when you can. Aim your shots._

Sliding on the wet grass, unable to stop in time, she thudded into the side of the Fed-Ex van, shoulder checking the rusty metal. She was glad he wasn’t there to see her do that, not after the amazing show she had just put on. Snagged on the jagged wheel well, the left sleeve of her denim jacket was now torn more than half away from the rest of the coat. She tugged it free, watching more of the denim and leather trim peel away. Part of her Tim Horton’s shirt came with it as well.

_Fuck. I loved this jacket. I’ll probably never find another one like it._

Finally taking in the full the extent of the damage her garment had suffered in the crash, she idly wondered why her purple and red shoulder wasn’t hurting. Seeing the hurt makes the pain real apparently, because her shoulder began to throb as if on cue. She would have to worry about it later. She popped her head around the side, checking to see if the way was clear to advance up the ramp. She had to get to Joel. One of them was going to start worrying soon.

The hunter didn’t see her. She heard his thudding footsteps on the damp earth. He was running fast, moving towards the car she had been hiding behind moments before. He had come down from the far end of the bridge, trying to sneak around behind them. He had a pistol in his hand. She recognized him as the one who had abandoned his heroics earlier, when she had winged the jackass with the cowboy rifle. He reached the car and came around it with his pistol ready, pointed down at the grass where she had been.

“Gone!” He looked down at her discarded motorcycle helmet, Joel’s empty gun, the remains of the blue nylon rope sling, the scattering of spent brass casings. “Fucking cunny! Bitch!”

Like most of these men, his accent was strange to her ears. She misheard the words. She wouldn’t have known one of them anyway. Ellie’s collection of profanity was impressive, but it wasn’t complete.

_I am a cunning bitch, fuckwad. Lemme show you how much!_

She raised her pistol. Aim your shots, he’d told her. She did.

“Hey! Billy Buttfucker!”

He looked up; saw her standing by the van. His eyes went wide with fear. He wasn’t expecting his flanking effort to fail. Wasn’t expecting to be caught dead to rights like this. Certainly wasn’t expecting to find a young girl drawing down on him, of all things. He tried to bring up his revolver but they both knew it wouldn’t do him any good. Three shots. Two of them hit. Down he went, landing hard in the mud where he had stood. Part of his skull landed somewhere else.

She stuffed the empty .32 in her jacket pocket. She would never part with it. Her switchblade was all she had of her mother. This small pistol was the only part of Joel she truly knew she had. Both items were sentimental. Both were deadly. She treasured them.

She thought about making a dash back to the dead man to grab his pistol or maybe make a quick search of her pack, but then she realized that the gunfire up on the bridge had stopped. There was grunting, shouting, the dull thwack of flesh being struck hard.

_He’s out of ammo! He needs me! Fuck, Ellie! Get your shit together!_

She ran as fast as her legs would carry her, past the rusted cars, jumping over chunks of broken concrete, weaving around scattered debris, never stopping for cover. Her breath hissed through her bared teeth. Her shotgun was ready in her hands. Two shells left. Two chances to help him.

She rounded the top of the onramp, turned left, in the direction of the rusty encampment, rushed at the dead bodies of the men who had been trying to draw a bead on Joel. One was missing most of the meat on his leg – only bloody bone where a thigh should be; the other had parted with most of his head. She leaped over their bodies, trying not to see the gore. Onward, towards the sound of the fighting, towards the still-burning shack, and the gutted, blazing, smoking one behind it. Somewhere further up, she could hear the raucous sound of terrified chickens. There wasn’t time to think about it. Fire was still burning in many places in this part of the camp, scattered in a crazy pattern from the splashed fuel set loose during the explosion. She tried to avoid it as best she could. The flames licked at her. She gripped the shotgun tightly. She couldn’t let herself feel fear. Not now. Joel was ahead somewhere, fighting for his life. She had to help.

She swung out wide in her headlong blitz, as much as the tight confines of the camp would allow, trying to avoid the twisted, fiery shed that had exploded so spectacularly earlier. She saw that there were several steel barrels ahead, lying both inside and around the destroyed shack, burst apart with sharp edges all around. They reminded her of the teeth of a shark’s mouth, the ocean monsters she had seen in her treasured old copies of National Geographic magazine. Fuel drums probably. There must have been a leak, a puddle, a lucky spark. The dark cloud of smoke was ahead, the tendrils of which were already reaching out for her, stinging her eyes. She rushed headlong into it.

The searing heat embraced her, there was no escaping its terrible touch. For a terrifying heartbeat, the world was swallowed in oily, choking, searing darkness. She’d had nightmares just like this all the time as a child. This was just like her visions of the hell the preacher at Saint Philomena’s had so often spoken of. The place he’d said she was already bound for at the irredeemable age of eight if she didn’t stop causing trouble and become a good girl instead. Lectures filled with threats followed by punishments. He never had time to talk to her about anything else. Just be a good girl, or else. Now get out of my office, I have important things to do.

_Good girl? How could I be? No one ever bothered to teach me, you old asshole._

Daylight! She burst through the smoke. It spiraled behind her, twisting in her wake, trying to claw her back to no avail. Hell would have to wait for another day.

Joel was far ahead, more than halfway across the bridge, trading punches with two foul looking men. One of them was bleeding badly from his nose. Absurdly, she unexpectedly remembered her favorite CD. It had been Riley’s disc really, but Ellie played it in their shared room constantly, almost on a loop, until Riley would throw pillows at her to make her stop. The guy on the cover of that album had a bloody face just like this man. Bloody Nose was trying to grab Joel’s arm, trying to pin it, trying to stop the punishing blows. The other man seized the opportunity to land a jab against Joel’s jaw. He staggered a bit, but didn’t fall. Joel was the toughest man Ellie had ever known, but two-on-one odds weren’t a good bet for anyone.

_Gotta get closer. Can’t shoot either of them from here. I’ll hit Joel too._

Her legs were growing tired, but she pushed them forward anyway.

_Come on, Ellie. Just a little more. Almost there._

She zipped past more of the sheds, noting how they were a mixture of living quarters and storage units. These men had been living here a long time, from the looks of it. Empty food cans. Old milk jugs filled with water and other things. Homemade cages housing a fluttering storm of feathers and squawks – chickens going crazy with fear. Animal skins, raccoon, deer, coyotes, drying on homemade racks. Squirrel meat, skewered and seasoned with salt and pepper, smoking over a cobbled-together grill. She sniffed the aroma of the meat hungrily as she scrambled around a long table stacked above and below with plastic laundry baskets filled with clothes, shoes, useful personal belongings. She doubted that any of the items were donated to these men out of charity. On the other side of the last table was another dead man to jump over. A bent pipe lay next to him; Joel’s handiwork, no doubt. She didn’t notice him stirring as she sailed over his body on her way to her friend.

_Almost! You can do it!_

Joel knocked the smaller of the two men down. Only Bloody Nose was still standing. Ellie was actually a little impressed by how tough he must be to take a beating like that from Joel and keep going. Bastard or not, you had to respect tough. The one who had fallen was reaching for something in a nearby metal bin: a long, heavy wrench of some kind. He was staggering to his feet. Joel didn’t see him. The man didn’t see her. She had closed the gap. Her shotgun was sure to rip him apart at this range.

_Just in time. Good job, legs._

“Get away from him!”

The man’s head swiveled around. He saw a young girl skidding to a stop on the cracked asphalt, wet with water, oil, and blood. Her canvas basketball shoes fought for traction, her legs worked to keep her upright, to no avail. She was going to tumble over.

_Fuck me! Not again!_

She spilled, sliding across the hard, unforgiving ground. Her knee was going to be sore for days to come. He lunged for her. Missed. She slid past his grasping hands. She almost cheered as she passed beyond the reach of his fumbling fingers. She kept going until her shoulder stuck the guardrail, wiping the triumphant smile from her face. The same shoulder as before. Bruises on top of bruises. She spun hard, flipping over, face down. Her right arm slipped right through the gaps between the steel bands of the railing. Her knuckles scraped against the harsh concrete. She kept her grip on the handle of shotgun. Barely.

“Ow! Fuck!” She had hit her head on the asphalt pretty badly. Add a headache to her list of complaints later.

_Shoulda… kept… the helmet… on…_

Hands on her again. Pulling hard. Not Joel’s. The grip on her ankle was painfully strong.

“Come here, you little cunt!”

Still on her belly, she tried to grab the railing with her free hand, tried to pull away from him. She realized instantly that she was not strong enough to hold on for long. She kicked at him with her free leg instead, calling him every name she could think of. Something struck her thigh, it went numb. She screamed.

_Forgot about that fucking wrench!_

“You little whore! I’m gonna bust your head open like a piñata!”

She twisted around, craning her neck, trying to see him. He was standing tall, pulling at her leg with his free hand, holding a wrench with the other. Her hips were almost off the ground at this point. She didn’t know what the hell a piñata was, but he seemed intent on pulling her up, dangling her by her leg, and beating her to death with that big wrench. Her shotgun had other ideas. So did he, once he saw it come snaking out from beneath the guardrail, her finger on the trigger. His eyes went white all around the edges.

“Who’s the whore now?!” she shrieked, swinging the gun to bear, terror taking the badassedness from her voice that she so desperately felt she deserved at that moment.

She pulled the trigger and the arm holding the wrench exploded at the elbow. He dropped her, blood spraying from his stump. They were both screaming. She looked in horror at what she had done. She had never used her beloved shotgun on a person before, not at this range. She saw that a pistol bullet had grazed the shoulder of that same arm earlier. The blood was already beginning to clot beneath in the long, ragged groove in his shirt. It was him! The man with the cowboy rifle! She didn’t know what else to do but pull the second trigger, put the other spray of pellets into his gut to put him down. Anything to stop the agony playing out before her. He flew back, blood and other things erupting from his stomach. She never even felt the gun kick in her numb hands.

“Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck…” She crawled backwards from the gore that spilled from the man, arcing through the air like a thick, wet rain that she had called into being. She scooted back towards the guardrail. Away from the writhing, screaming, burst open thing that the man had become. Some of his blood was on her jeans. She tried to wipe it away.

Without warning, the world began to do cartwheels again. She was being lifted up. Strong, furious hands. Not Joel’s. The man she had missed earlier in her rush to reach Joel was grabbing her, lifting her, trying to throw her off the bridge. She had a quick flash of herself splatting all over the asphalt below. She pushed the thought away and began to do her best to wiggle free of those awful hands. The shotgun fell from her grip. He kicked it away, over towards the dying man, into the spreading pool of blood. Somewhere in the distance, alarmingly far away, she saw Joel swinging hard at Bloody Nose with a rusty tube. Something large and oblong was attached to it. She thought it was a muffler, but she wasn’t sure.

“JOEL! HELP!”

She was going over. The cloudy sky and the dark asphalt traded places. He was going to throw her off headfirst. She tried to reach for her switchblade, but her right arm was being gripped too hard. The knife was in her right back pocket. She strained her left arm, but that shoulder had taken too much abuse today. It wouldn’t make the reach, no matter how hard she willed it. She yelped with pain as he twisted her around so she would be sure to see the end coming.

The man’s voice was eager, victorious. “Get ready for it, bitch!”

She kicked as hard as she could, but one of her legs was numb, unresponsive. She tried to connect her only flailing heel with his elbow, irrationally hoping to explode it like before.

More hands on her. Strong. Fierce. Grabbing one of her ankles.

“Let go of her, you sonofabitch!”

“Joel!”

Relief surged through her in the half-second before she became the rope in a tug of war. She squealed sharply as they pulled at her. She felt like her bones were surely going to come loose at the joints. The bastard shifted his grip on her, flipping her over to face the sky. Her legs twisted around in Joel’s hands. The bastard had her by the neck, his other arm looped under her armpit, across her chest. Joel had her by the ankles, tugging hard, forcing her throat against the other man’s arm. Joel was choking her with his efforts. She tried to bite the man, but his arm was under her chin. Her teeth couldn’t find his flesh. Spots appeared before her eyes. Her hip smacked into the sharp edge of the guardrail as they swung her about. Stinging pain barely felt as she began to slip into darkness. It was the same side as the leg that took the blow from the wrench. She would limp for days after this. The hunter reached across her stomach, grabbed the waistband of her jeans from the inside, his knuckles digging into her lower belly, grinding into the cotton of her panties, using the denim handhold to pull her towards him, hard. The feel of his hand down there made her sick in a way she couldn’t quite describe. Later, in better times, she would choose to retell this event as the worst wedgie of her life.

The man howled, her mother’s switchblade in his thigh. She didn’t remember pulling it out of her pocket. She had never felt it in her hand. He let go of her and she began to tumble, her skull rocketing towards the ground. Joel tossed her aside like a sack of laundry before her head could smack anything. She landed on the same bruised shoulder and rolled limply away to safety.

“C’mere you motherfucker!” Joel’s voice was a bloodcurdling bellow. It echoed off the rusty sheds and across the countryside. It sounded wonderful to her ears.

_Fuck him up, Joel. I’ll be right there… in just a minute._

She lay on her stomach, her head resting on her curled arm. She could feel that her denim jacket was torn into at least two pieces. Two and a half, maybe. Her white shirt was torn along the left shoulder, split almost all the way around the seam. She tried to focus her eyes. The spots were disappearing quickly. Behind her, blows were being exchanged. Dull, heavy thwacks of fists against flesh. She tried to catch her breath. Both men were grunting with the effort. Her every joint ached.

“I got… to get up…” she wheezed into the thick denim wrinkled around her elbow. “Needs… my help…”

Ellie turned her head with great effort, looking just in time to see Joel kick the bastard over the side of the railing. A swiftly fading scream. A dull, wet crunch. He was dead.

_Gonna have to get my switchblade out of his leg later. That’s gonna be messy._

She closed her eyes. Just for a minute. Just long enough to get some wind in her lungs. The feeling was returning to her leg where he had struck her with the wrench. She groaned in pain, drawing her legs up slightly and wished the nerves down there had taken their sweet time coming back to life. Why the rush? The hip was giving her plenty of dull, throbbing pain as it was.

_No need to gang up on me all at once, nerve endings._

“You doin’ okay, kiddo?” Joel was standing over her, providing some very pleasant shade on the warm, wet asphalt. Thoughtful of him, really.

“I’m fine. Nothing broken. Still have most of my limbs, I think,” she mumbled into the crook of her arm. “Just taking a break. Figured I’d earned one, boss.”

A soft chuckle. She smiled. She liked to make him laugh. Strong hands turned her over slowly, considerately. She tried very hard not to whimper. She looked up at him through half-open eyes. He was kneeling beside her, backlit by the clearing sky behind him. She lay there on her back, helpless but safe before him. She blinked a few times.

“Hey, you.” Her voice was very soft. She was very tired.

“Hey yourself, kiddo.”

She smiled. So did he.

“You sure you’re okay, Ellie?”

She nodded and made a short, affirmative “Mm!” noise.

He helped her sit up. She ached everywhere. His hands were covered in blood. They could be fierce, deadly things, but they were gentle with her. She wanted to lean against him, just for a minute. After the events of today, she decided to risk it and take a chance. She rested her head against his chest. He didn’t push her away.

_Don’t ditch me, Joel. We’re a team. Don’t ditch me like all the others did._

“Don’t move,” she chided, closing her eyes in gratitude. “You’re the only thing keeping me from falling over right now.”

He chuckled again. She felt it rumble inside him. He squeezed her shoulder. “You did a hell of a good job today, kid.”

_So fucking glad he picked the good shoulder._

“Fuck yeah, I did.” She felt a yawn coming on, out of the blue, didn’t quite manage to suppress it. “You gotta admit, Joel… When you were hauling ass for that van down there… When I was shooting the hell out of those guys… For just a few seconds, I was so awesome, you were _my_ sidekick.”

He chuckled and squeezed her shoulder again. She snuggled into him, just a little. She wanted to sit like this forever.

_Keep me around, Joel. I’m useful. You know I am._

”Yeah, yeah. I’ll admit it. I was plenty impressed, you reckless little shit. ‘Course, the next thing I knew, you were up here with me, about to get tossed over the side like a sack of old potatoes.”

“Yeah,” she shrugged, admonished, wishing he had let her have her moment of victory for just a minute longer before popping her bubble, “Not my finest moment. But we got through it. We always do.”

“So far, I guess.”

He pulled a rag from his shirt pocket and began to dab the mud from her face. Gingerly, he wiped away her war paint. She was happy to let him, happy to let it go. This battle was over and she wanted to be a kid again. She basked in the attention. She wondered if perhaps someone had taken the time to treat her just half this kindly as a child would she would be less starved for affection now? She knew it was a weakness of hers and that Joel didn’t care much for weakness. But she couldn’t help herself sometimes. And in those moments, Joel was surprisingly kind to her, which was sort of amazing, given how gruff he tended to be the rest of the time. Doubly amazing when she considering how she had glimpsed him beating another man to death with a rusty muffler just a few minutes ago.

_I bet he gives great hugs. Gotta find a way to trick him into doing that one of these days._

She sighed, knowing that the moment to get up, collect their guns, and search the camp would be here far too soon for her liking. But until that moment came, she would drink in every second of the time she had now.

_Fine. One point to you, God. But don’t think we’re close to being square. Not even._

Joel let her rest against him for a few more minutes, until he was sure she was ready to stand. She was, but she would have preferred to sit with him a while longer. Nonetheless, she did not complain. She rarely did.

He helped her up.

**. . .**

   
“Looks like these sons a bitches practically had their own little fort up here.” Joel was digging through a collection of boxes stacked near a dirty mattress inside one of the rusty sheds. A new rifle with a fancy folding stock was slung across his back.

He had called it a ‘Mini-14’. The long, banana-shaped magazine fitted into it was almost full. It had been hidden under a mattress in a different shed, probably squirreled away as a weapon of last resort. They must have never thought they would need it against one aging man and a young girl on a motorcycle. She wondered if it would be a good replacement for the scoped rifle. Maybe if it were, he would let her carry the Winchester, since surely he didn’t need _two_ rifles.

Her own shotgun was once again slung across her shoulders, where it belonged. Joel had fashioned a new sling for her using a sturdy old leather belt and two key rings he had scrounged up. Feeling it secure around her torso again made her feel totally badass. It was like Christmas morning had come early. She smiled warmly. She would have to be extra nice to Joel for the next few days.

_Maybe I'll take some of those eggs we found in the chicken coops. Tomorrow morning, I’ll see if he’ll let me cook. I can try my hand at making scrambled eggs for us. God knows I made enough of them back when I was on kitchen detail with Cherry back at the school. But this time, I won’t spit in ‘em._

“Smarter than I woulda given ‘em credit for anyways,” he continued, finding a few fresh batteries for their flashlights. He was having all the luck in this shack. Ellie was glad they weren’t keeping score today.

“Why’s that?” Ellie asked, digging through the pockets of the ratty clothes hanging in the corner of the shed. A rag, a few spare parts, a single round for Joel’s .357 revolver. She had surreptitiously discovered a few nudie magazines tucked under the edge of the mattress closest to her. She tried to hover in that general area while she worked, not daring to swipe them with him nearby. He wouldn’t approve of her curiosity. She’d played it off the first time, on the road to Pittsburgh, but she didn’t think he’d fall for that ploy again.

Beyond those meager items already in her hands, there wasn’t much else left to find over here. She moved to another corner of the shack, exploring the insides of broken down boots, old shopping bags, pots and pans. She tried as casually as possible to keep one eye on the edge of the mattress that concealed the magazines and hoped that Joel wouldn’t stumble upon them before she slide a couple of them into the safety of her backpack, now returned safely to her shoulders. Her trusty switchblade was in her pocket. Again, she cut her eyes quickly to the porno’s hiding spot.

_Be patient, my darlings. Ellie hasn’t forgotten about you. Soon you’ll tell me all your secrets._

“Shit heels built their camp up on this overpass,” Joel was saying. “Good place for an ambush. Gives you round the clock coverage of the road and a great view of the surrounding area. Blocked off with cars on each side. No one can get to you easy.”

_Shit heels. I am so using that word one of these days._

She tried her best not to think about Joel’s knowledge of such things as this ambush camp and these dead hunters. She didn’t want to think of him as one of them, no matter how long in the past it might have been – she hoped it was many years ago, before she was even born. When she did let the thoughts slip in, she couldn’t stop her mind from imagining herself as one of his victims. It filled her with dread. Joel wasn’t the sort of man you would want as an enemy. She wondered briefly, and not for the first time, about what he had done to the women who had fallen into his grasp. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, so she told herself the same comforting story she always repeated when the thought of old, bad Joel doing that sort of thing popped into her head.

_Joel wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t do that to a woman. He just wouldn’t._

_He would never do that to me. _

_Although… the thought of him getting a little rough… the thought of him making me… do stuff… It is kind of a turn on._

_Fuck! Why am I so fucking weird about stuff like this?_

“Overpass?” she asked, checking an old aquarium that was now filled with all manner of interesting plastic junk. “What’s that?”

“Here ya go, Red.”

She smiled as he rolled three 28 gauge shells across the floor to her. She scooped them up with a delighted whoop. Her shotgun was back in business. She loaded a pair and tucked the spare one away for later. When they got the Honda back on its wheels, she would add this one to the little bag of ammo in the storage compartment.

“An overpass is this thing we’re on. When a highway passes over another highway, the top road is called an overpass. The other is the underpass.”

“Overpass. Got it,” she said, inspecting a handful of pistol shell casings she found in a little baggie. All empty. “This whole time, I thought this was a bridge.”

“Sort of the same thing, I guess.” He was holding up a mostly empty box of 12 gauge shells. Five rounds rattled around inside. He pocketed them.

“So…” She began tentatively. Time to broach the subject. She didn’t want to know, not really, but the voice inside her head told her that the knowledge might be of use to her one day in the future. “How did you know this was an ambush? What gave it away?”

“The debris laying all over the damn highway beneath the overpass. Just enough small stuff to force you to slow down as you’re about to reach the underpass. But not enough big stuff to draw attention to itself until you’re too close and you see just how _much_ of it there is. Hard thing to spot when you’re on the move at highway speeds.”

“Unless you know what to look for, right?”

“Yep.” His voice was much too aloof for such a terrible confession.

The single word made her wince. She tried very hard to think of Joel as _anything_ other than a hunter. Moments like this made it very difficult. Didn’t he feel any remorse for what he had done?

_Stay good, Joel. Please stay good. If I can be good, you can be too._

“Oh! Hey! Guess what one of those bastards called me.”

He was game. The scavenging had been particularly good here, enough to offset most of the ammunition they had burned through, at least. Maybe a little extra. No way to know for sure until they took stock of their inventory tonight. “Who called you what?”

“That asshole with the revolver like yours. The one who tried to sneak up on us. He came running down from the other side of the bridge to get us from behind while you were up there blowing everyone to bits with your shotgun.”

“He did? I missed that.”

“Pffft. Don’t sweat it. I totally handled it. _Like a pro_.” She popped the lid of a small plastic bucket that sat beside the moldy mattress on the floor, under the roughly cut out window. She instantly regretted it and put the lid back on. Tightly.

“Good work. Just what I would expect of a professional gunfighter. So what did he call you?” He was done now, leaning in the doorway, watching her scrounge, making sure she didn’t miss anything.

“A cunning bitch.” She said it with pride, looking back over her shoulder at him. She narrowed her eyes for emphasis, still marveling at the bastard’s assessment of her. “Cunning means sneaky or devious or something like that, right?”

“It sure does.”

She beamed. “Cool. You think the label fits? ‘Cause I kinda like it. Maybe I’ll get it tattooed across my back one of these days. Big letters, so everyone will know not to mess with me.”

“The cunning part fits you, sure enough. But I’d leave the rest out when you go to the tattoo parlor. Might scare away the boys one day,” he offered with a good-natured shrug of his shoulders. “Just my suggestion, is all.”

She rolled her eyes and smiled. She didn’t know what a tattoo parlor was, but she knew she’d like to visit one now, just so Joel could take her there and tell her more about them. The only way she had ever heard of to get tattoos was to pay one of the older students a pack of stale cigarettes and then wait while they pricked your arm for an hour with a needle and a broken ballpoint pen.

_And who said it had to be just boys I’m trying to not scare away? Maybe I like to keep my options open, old man. Badass action chicks like me do that sort of thing, you know._

She and Riley had always joked about getting matching tattoos, but could never settle on a design. Riley wanted a flaming skull, Ellie wanted a shark. Or fierce dog. Or maybe a knife dripping blood. Or an ace of spades. Or rearing black stallion with red eyes. Or…

_Who am I kidding? I didn’t really want a tattoo. But if push came to shove, I would have gotten a flaming skull, just to please Riley. And I would have cherished it._

_I was always happy to let her boss me around. She was the only one who could._

_Until you showed up, Joel. You’re the only one who can boss me around like she did. It's kind of awesome._

She found she didn’t want to think about Riley on a triumphant day like this. She pushed it out of her head.

With a sizzling air guitar riff to mark the occasion, she had officially finished searching her half of the shack. She stood up and wiped her hands on her shirt. It had only one long sleeve now. The cotton covering the left arm had been torn almost entirely around the seam .She had cut it of and planned to use it as a rag to clean her guns. Her precious denim jacket had been discarded also, too ruined to be of any use to her anymore. She had placed it in the fire with great ceremony, thanking Kristi Chau for her fine gift. But she only did this when she was sure Joel wasn’t looking. He thought she was weird enough as it was.

She had been shocked to find two new bullet holes in the fabric, one in the collar flap by the neck. For a moment, she wondered how close she had come to dying that day but then she shivered, and suddenly didn’t want to think about it anymore.

Ellie gave the shack one last look. This was one incredibly dirty sleeping area. Just touching this stuff had left her with an immense need for a bar of soap and a motel sink filled with water.

They were practically done with the entire camp now. Everything had been searched.

“So what’s next, old man?”

“Well, _little girl_ , we go out there and enjoy some of that squirrel that’s cookin’ on the barbeque.” He dusted his hands off and went out the door. “C’mon. This place stinks. Let get some fresh air.”

She followed him, limping slightly, disappointed slightly, hungry more than slightly. The chance to swipe a few of the nudie magazines had slipped beyond her grasp and she tried to let them go gracefully.

_You fine, naked people are my gift to the next kind souls that come along this road. Farewell, my almost-friends. It was not meant to be._

“Roasted squirrel,” she said liltingly, stepping out into the brightening day. “Yummy.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like it.” He was ahead of her, striding through the camp like a conquering king. As least, to her eyes anyway.

“Hey, I’ll admit it,” she said, trying to catch up. “I turned my nose up at it the first time you served it up. But I’ve seen the light now. Tree rat beats hunger pains every time.”

_Weird the things you can get a taste for when you’re outside the quarantine zone, out here in the real world for long enough._

As they walked to the center of the camp, where the meat was still cooking, she looked up at the clear sky and saw several birds circling overhead.

“Look, Joel. Birds.”

“Mm hmm. They’re waiting for us to leave.”

“What for?”

“They want the same thing we do: To eat.” He indicated the dead hunters lying around with a quick sweep of his hand.

“Ahh. Gross. Well, circle of life and all that shit.”

“Yep.” He slowed, allowed her to catch up. He passed her a small handful of .32 bullets that he’d found. She took them happily.

“Sweet! Two-Gun Ellie is back in business!” She dug out the smaller of the two magazines and began to slip the rounds into it.

“One-Gun Ellie. And where the hell _is_ my gun anyway?”

“Down there by the bike. Can you fix that, by the way? Or are we walking again?”

“I’ll have to take a closer look. But I don’t think the damage was too bad. Maybe we can limp it along to a garage or someplace. Get some tools. Give it a good goin’ over.” He passed her a stick loaded with squirrel meat and a smattering of green apple slices.

“Cooh. I hayh wahkhuh,” she said around a mouthful of savory meat.

“I hate walking too. And chew your damn food, girl.”

“Nevuh.”

He inspected the old metal locker near the smoldering grill. It was the only thing they hadn’t searched yet. It was sealed shut with a padlock, but the hasp itself was pretty rusty. One broken shiv and a few dislodged rusty screws later, it swung open easily enough. The shelves were lined with bottles and cans of beer. Judging from size of the locker and the collection of colorful stains on the shelves, this had once been a paint locker, probably in somebody’s basement or garage.

“Well, warm beer is better than no beer,” he grumbled, trying like hell to see the bright side of things for once, the way she always did. This was free beer, after all.

“Yaaah! Cah Ah haff wah, Johh?” She’d already eaten half the meat on the stick and was working hard on getting the rest of it inside her as fast as possible. If there weren’t plenty more skewers still sizzling on the grill, she might have considered gnawing on the stick too.

“Hell no, you can’t ‘have one’. Beer ain’t for kids, Ellie.”

She swallowed defiantly. Her aching throat protested. She had yet to remember that she had been screaming during the gunfight earlier. That moment wasn’t to come for months.

“I’ve had beer before, Joel. Now come on. Let me have a beer. Just one! Pleeeeease?”

He sized her up, watching her tear the last piece of meat from the skewer and trying to smile at him while doing so. All the times she had teased him came back to him and he saw an opening for a bit of revenge.

“Did you turn twenty-one when I wasn’t lookin’? Or is your little butt still fourteen?”

“JOEL!” She stamped her foot. In that moment, he had a fleeting image of his ex-wife on the day she had stormed out for good. “I’m _not_ a goddamned baby and _you know it!_ ”

He tried to juxtapose the sweet girl he had seen reading comics by the campfire last night with the wild hellion he had watched blast the bejeezus out of the hunter’s camp this morning. It was a hard thing to reconcile. She was a kid in so many ways, but she had her moments of glory too, no doubt about it. True, she hadn’t really hit much with all that ammo she had fired off. Only winged one guy in the arm, near as he could tell from condition of the men he had fought up there. Maybe you could count that guy that got burning kerosene splashed on his arm, if you were feeling generous about things. But that was about the sum total of it. Still, she’d been screaming like a banshee and sending bullets bouncing everywhere. That helped put the fear into them. All that hollering drew their attention and kept all eyes off of him while he was exposed, running out in the open. No doubt, that particular unsettling sound was surely the last thing they had expected to hear when they’d woke up this morning.

And to be fair to her, that explosion was the coolest damn thing he’d seen in a while.

“One,” he said sternly, locking eyes with her and holding up a single finger for emphasis. “One beer.”

She almost danced, grinning and chewing excitedly. If it weren’t for her limp, she would have bounced up and down. Instead, she dropped the empty stick and clapped her hands together in a way that was both endearing and obnoxiously celebratory about getting her way. Cute. And sexy too.

He exhaled, wishing he didn’t see her as being so sensuous and lovely sometimes, as he turned to study the contents of the locker.

“Budweiser or Coors?”

“Can I have that Miller?”

“There’s only one can. And you ain’t getting’ it, gunslinger. That one’s for me.”

“Pleeease?”

“Only kids pout. And pouters don’t get beer.”

“Budweiser, please,” she said in her best adult voice.

 

* * *

 

The birds drifted overhead until every bit of the last squirrel-kabob was eaten and more than two beers were drank. The pair of forms still moving down there gathered up all the loot they could carry and drove away on a wobbly motorcycle. The rest of the meat, slowly cooling on the asphalt, was left behind for the birds and the other animals of the woods. Later that day, a big yellow dog would feast. He was lonely, but a full belly can be quite soothing in its own way.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that’s one chapter done! Only a metric ton more writing and revising to go before this volume is finished. My thanks to Michelle, Stu, D.H.N.K., and anyone else who’s been a help to me as I cobbled this redonkulously over-sized story together. And thanks to everyone who read, commented, kudo’d, or bookmarked the first volume. I hope you enjoy this volume just as much and will stick with it all the way to the end. There are lots of twists and turns ahead as Joel and Ellie make their way to both Jackson and their eventual romantic rendezvous with the smutty, slightly underaged destiny that Joellie fanfic demands. ;-)
> 
> Check back on Wednesday for Chapter Two: The Forest Spirits.


	2. The Forest Spirits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With their motorcycle in need of repairs, Joel and Ellie make camp in the forest and plan their next move.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 02 – The Forest Spirits**

 

The breeze played refreshingly in the girl’s damp, unbound hair. Her favorite ponytail holder was wrapped loosely around her trigger finger, which was itself resting on the side of her trusty shotgun. The shady spot of this cluster of trees was still cool this early in the morning and the gentle winds coming through made it just a bit too chilly for her tastes.

The teenaged girl stepped out into the sun, brushing her auburn locks out of her face so she could feel the morning rays upon her cheeks. The warm grass felt lush and welcome beneath her feet. Her socks were drying on a rock down by the creek behind her; the well-worn sneakers she loved so much were airing out in the sun, next to the battered bike, beside a larger, sturdier pair of work boots. Their shoes had gotten pretty soaked yesterday, with the rain and the fighting on the slick grass around the overpass. Joel said that wearing wet shoes all the time could cause ‘trench foot.’ She had no idea what that was, but it sounded horrifying. She was eager to let them dry for as long as necessary. Besides, on a day so nice, she was in no hurry to put them back on anyway. ‘Laundry day’, as she insisted on calling it, only came once a week or so (provided they could find a source of clean water), and it was pretty much their only chance to rest and relax. It wasn’t exactly a break, as they spent most of the morning stitching up their clothes, maintaining and repairing their gear, foraging, bathing, and, of course, washing their clothes, which had become pretty ripe by that time. Free time, such as it was, came only in the evening, and only for a few hours at that.

It wasn’t a real day off, of course, she admitted to herself, but it made for a pretty nice change of pace from the typical breakneck pace Joel set.

_I know we don’t have time for sightseeing or anything. I know I need to get to the Fireflies, and the sooner the better. Everybody’s counting on me and stuff. I know that. I do. And I feel guilty about wanting to spend days like this just hanging out and talking with him. It’s selfish of me, I guess. But I want to feel normal sometimes. But it’s like he can’t wait to get me to Wyoming or something. Is he in that much of a hurry to get back to Boston? Or ready to see his brother again? … Or is he just dying to get rid of me?_

Just thinking about last option filled her with a cold, icy feeling.

_Shit. I’m happy we found that bike, but I wish this trip would last just a little longer. I’m sure I can convince him to let me stick around once we’ve found the Fireflies and they’ve done whatever the fuck it is they’re going to do to me…hopefully, that part won’t be too painful. And once that’s done, if I can just show him that I won’t be a burden to him… maybe…I won’t be on my own again._

_He can’t be planning to make the trip all the way back to fucking Boston or wherever it he's going by himself. He’ll need someone to cover his back. He’ll need me._

A new thought occurred to her. One she had not considered before.

_What if he’s planning to settle down near his brother? Find a house or something and settle down to stay in Wyoming? It’s possible. He’s not all that young anymore. Tess is gone. Maybe he wants to be near family now._

She let this idea spread out in front of her, unfolding it slowly in her mind. The possibilities there made her breath catch in the back of her throat for a second.

_Is that it, Joel? Do you want to reconnect with your family? I could be part of that family! You and me. I don’t even need to be a big part of it. Just… something. A babysitter for Tommy’s kids – if he has some, I mean. Or a bodyguard. A little one. Or I could walk the dog – I hope Tommy has a dog. I could wash dishes. Or just be a terrible houseguest who never leaves. I won’t even ask for my own room/ Just some corner to put my stuff in. I’ll sleep on the fucking couch! Hell, I’ll sleep in the fucking closet! Or in the bathtub! I’m not picky._

_I mean, why the hell not? Where the fuck else am I gonna go? I don’t have anyone else who gives a shit about me! You’re as good as it gets! I make you laugh, right? And I’m there for you whenever you need ‘suppressing fire’, right? Surely you can find some small place in your life for a funny girl like me. Right?_

She smiled devilishly, blushing at an unbidden thought.

_And if that place happens to be in your bed, well that would be just fine._

She took a deep breath and reminded herself not to get her hopes up, not for the last part, not for any of it. She had been down that road before. Her hand flexed on the foregrip of the shotgun, fingertips drumming nervously on the smooth walnut, as she tried to push the thought out of her head. But it wouldn’t quite go. There was a chance here. Once more chance. Maybe the last chance before she got too old, before she became a grownup and the door marked ‘family that will take care of a kid like you’ slammed closed, shutting her out for good. If that happened… she’d be alone. Maybe forever.

_Fuck, I almost wish we’d never found this bike. I wish that we’d had to walk all the way to fucking Wyoming instead. Shit! At this rate, we’ll be there in a few weeks. Maybe a month, at most. I need more time to convince you to let me stick around._

Another deep, cleansing breath. She closed her eyes and let it out, trying to release the anxiety along with it. She blinked and did her best to focus on the beautiful forest around her.

_Fuck it, Ellie. Just think happy fucking thoughts, will you?_

_I’m trying, Annoying Voice Inside My Head. But it’s not easy. Plus, I’m covered in bruises from yesterday and my skin is itchy as fuck where I slid through that oil slick._

_Probably should have washed that stuff off sooner, now that I think about it._

_Okay, happy thoughts… Happy thoughts… Let’s see. Whadda we got?_

She concentrated on that while also trying to watch the road like she was supposed to be doing. The duties of a sentry did not include existential crises.

_The breeze is nice. It’s not raining. The sun is out. It feels nice to not wear a bra for a while. Going commando is always a treat. But I shouldn’t let Joel know it. He’s weird about stuff._

_But damn, my thigh hurts. That bruise is fucking huge! And my back is all itchy._

Ellie adjusted the waistband of her gray gym shorts and tugged at one of the spaghetti straps of her tank top. She hadn’t been completely dry from those chilly creek waters when she had put her ‘laundry day’ clothes on, and now her clothes were scratching her in the spots where the fabric had dried to her skin. Nevertheless it was a small price to pay for the rare treat of not being almost entirely covered up. She wasn’t wearing one of her usual long-sleeved undershirts, and it felt nice to experience the breeze on her bare arms and legs for a change. Keeping her arms covered all the time with sleeves was proving to be a pain, especially in the summertime.

_Fuck, I really miss short sleeves._

She sighed and shifted the weight of the shotgun strapped across her sore shoulder a bit. It was still aching from the battle the day before and showed no signs of letting up anytime soon.

_Gotta hide the fucking bite mark. Can’t let the world know I’m a freak._

_Fuck this world. Why did this shit have to happen to me?_

She took a deep, cleansing breath and let it slip away slowly, feeling all of her troubles drift away with it. Well, most of them anyway.

“Never gonna get tired of the woods,” she whispered to the nature spirits that she liked to imagine could be hiding anywhere in this little clearing, just off some unnamed back road. She knew they weren’t real, but in moments like this, she liked to pretend. Just a little. When no one was looking, of course.

_And if any of you spirits are fairies, then please fuck off. I’m asking nicely, because this is your forest and all, you creepy little naked butterfly winged people. Pretty please, fuck off. Okay? Thanks._

Twenty feet ahead of her, just at the edge of the secluded road, a small brown rabbit hopped out cautiously from behind a bush. It looked about nervously, as though it were deciding whether or not to cross the road. The rabbit’s adorable little eyes scanned the skies for birds of prey, his little bunny nose twitching all the while. Ellie couldn’t help but smile at him.

_Better get out of sight, little guy. If Joel sees you, you’re lunch._

The rabbit considered the situation for some time, but apparently thought better of things. He hopped back behind his bush. Maybe he would make the trip later. Maybe it was laundry day for him too.

_Damn. You’re so cute. And delicious. I’m glad I’m not the one who has to kill you guys._

Squirrels were one thing. But bunnies? She didn’t think she would ever have the resolve needed to kill a bunny. She could eat one, of course. Last night, in fact. But kill one? Even a badass, shotgun packing, action chick like herself had her limits.

_You’re cute. I’m cute. Cute does not kill cute. This will be the law of Ellie’s New America._

The breeze stirred again, from behind this time, dancing around her, blowing her hair forward around her face again. Almost imperceptibly, she leaned back into it. The warm wind felt luxurious on her limbs. It slipped through the thin cotton of her garments. She groaned softly. Going commando was the best thing ever. She wished laundry day came every day. When the breeze had passed, she pulled her hair out of her eyes again and considered putting it up in a ponytail but thought better of it.

Idly, she began to whistle a tuneless ditty of her own composing. Somewhere nearby, a bird began to sing back to her. She found she couldn’t smile and whistle at the same time.

_How did I go my entire life without knowing how stone cold awesome the woods were?_

_Oh man, Riley. I wish you could see this. It’s even better than we dreamed._

A scrap of music percolated up from somewhere in the depths of her head. She grinned, remembering how she and Riley had danced to that song and many others like it in their dorm room after classes and drills and the evening meal. They danced badly, joyfully, energetically, like the world held no future for them. They danced like they were young.

_She was always a better dancer than me. But that’s not saying much. But, oh man, it was so much fun._

They danced right up to the last minute, almost every night. Right up until ‘lights out’. Always the rebels, always defying the rules as much as they could. Some nights, the administrators would post a dorm guard right outside their door, a demerit slip ready, listening to the music coming from inside their room, watching the clock taped to his clipboard. They almost always timed it perfectly. Almost always, anyways. And even if they didn’t, so what? Who gives a shit about a stupid demerit? Because fuck those guys. Fuck their stupid rules! Fuck ‘em with the sticks they all seemed to have up their asses.

_All we had was each other. So we danced._

She smiled at the memories of her friend and began to sing the song to herself. “I gotta feeling… that tonight’s gonna be a good night…”

With her shotgun supported by her new leather sling, she swayed subtly, making small steps from side to side, nodding her head in time with the music she was making. The creak of the leather sling became a languorous counterpoint to her song. It swung gently, dancing with her in the sunlight. She did her best to keep her undulations to a low ebb. Wouldn’t do to be caught dancing on guard duty. Not that Joel gave demerits but he might tease her or threaten her with a beating – which was also his way of teasing her. It was cute, really. You just had to know Joel to understand it.

_Well, that’s just the chance a girl has to take. Sometimes the music just moves you. If you weren’t so old, Joel, you’d understand that._

_I wonder if he knows how to dance? Maybe. Probably those classy old people dances._

“Look at her dancing, just take it off! … Let's paint the town, we'll shut it down! … Let's burn the roof, and then we'll do it again...” she crooned softly, swaying her hips just a little, careful to make sure that she wasn’t singing loudly enough for Joel to hear over the sounds of his splashing around down in the creek fifty or sixty feet away.

The bunny suddenly dashed across the road, a brown blur moving like his life hung in the balance. He disappeared into the dense brush on the other side.

“Awww! My singing’s not THAT bad, you cute little shit,” she chuckled, her hands on her hips, indignant, no longer dancing. “Come back here with again that sort of attitude, and I’m making adorable little slippers out of you.”

She was kidding. She could never hurt a bunny. Not in a million years.

“Damn that water was cold!” Joel was somewhere behind her, coming up from the creek, pushing his way through thick bushes on his way to their little campsite. She stood stiffly, professionally. She became the very model of a dedicated sentry. She was careful to keep her back to him. She had been doing so since he went down to the creek to bathe a little while ago. That was the first rule of laundry day. No peeking.

_Ellie’s New America has many rules. Most of them benefit Ellie, but that is entirely a coincidence, citizen._

Without looking, Ellie replied, “I told you that half an hour ago, when you were up here on watch and I was the one freezing my ass off in that creek. And do you remember what you told me? You told me to _suck it up_.” She stretched out each word.

“Yeah, well. That was before I knew how cold that water was.” If he was chagrined at all, she couldn’t hear it. Such an asshole. It was inspiring to her, in a way.

“Suck it up, Joel.” She sang, grinning. It felt so damn good to tease him. Since the battle at the overpass, he had been particularly receptive to interacting with her. She wanted this new state of affairs to continue into the future.

_That’s why I need him. He keeps me entertained. He keeps my mind off things._

“Watch it, kid. There’s lots of sticks layin’ around out here. Any one of ‘em would be just about perfect for beating any red-headed step-children I might happen to have handy.”

“I’m an orphan, you ass! I wasn’t lucky enough to get promoted to stepchild. Thanks for reminding me of the heartbreak that is my life! God! You’re so mean to me!”

She laughed. His feet swished through the grass. He was very near now.

“You’re decent, right?” she asked, making a point not to turn her head. “Or do I need to brace my young eyes for the sudden, terrifying arrival of a wild Joelbutt on the prowl in its native habitat?”

“What? Shut up. Of course I’m decent, you little turd,” he groused, passing by her shoulder on his way to the bike and their bags. His gruff voice said he was hiding a smile.

“Hey now. Don’t be upset. I have to ask. I’m a young teenaged orphan girl and easily corrupted by the bad behaviors of my grumpy old role models. It’s called peer pressure. Look it up. Besides, _you_ always ask _me,_ ” she baited him affectionately.

“That’s different,” he said as he brushed past. “I’m old and borin’. You’re the damn wild child of this group. I can’t take any chances with you. Who knows what the hell you might do next. Today might be the day you decide to take up streakin’. _That’s_ why I always ask.”

“Old? Sure. But boring? Come on! Give yourself a little credit, Joel. Boring people don’t haul wild childs like me around the ruins of America on the back of their stolen motorcycles, teaching them to shoot guns at people, or why taping scissors to baseball bats always makes for a better time, or how to bust a lock with a shiv.”

“Never taught you how to shiv a lock, kid.”

“Oh, yeah! That’s right! Well, go ahead and pencil that in for tomorrow. Okay?” She had been hoping to set that trap for him for a while and now he had finally fallen into it. She flashed her best charming smile at him.

_Gotcha!_

“And what the fuck is streaking? Tell me! I’m always up for new experiences. Or tell me about picking locks. Either one sounds fun.”

He wasn’t sure he liked getting played like that and so he was about to do his usual response of dropping the topic. She could sense it. She was certain she was finally starting to pick up on the little cues he gave off. For example, when he was done talking about something. He shook his head.

“That’ll do, wild child.”

_Whew! Glad I saw that one coming. It’s like a fucking minefield with this guy sometimes. But who else am I going to talk to? Besides, I like getting to know you. Just wish you didn’t make it so hard, you old fart. I’m busting my ass to not be my old ‘problem child’ self, trying to make it as easy as I can for you to be nice to me. Meet me halfway, dude._

Joel wore his old, very faded sweat pants cinched tight around his waist with a fraying drawstring. They had probably been navy blue once upon a time, but now they had dulled to an indistinct shade of grayish-blue. He was still rubbing his head with his towel. In his right hand, he carried his revolver. He was never unarmed. He was, however, barefoot and wore no shirt. His big arms and powerful torso were covered in numerous old scars. Some of the larger ones were even visible beneath his thick rug of chest hair.

Weeks on the road with him and she had still not become entirely used to the sight of those old wounds. His body had more patches and stitches than her favorite and now dearly departed denim jacket.

“Jeez, Joel,” she ventured, finally daring to broach the topic with him, hoping this wasn’t about to blow up in her face. “ _That_ is a lot of scars.”

“The life I’ve lived, kid,” he said simply, spreading his wet towel out in the grass next to hers, letting the sun work its magic.

He offered nothing more about the subject. She would have to press him, gently.

“I wish I had a few more cool scars,” she offered, friendly at first, thinking of the scar on her eyebrow, but trailing off quickly when her eyes went to the bite mark on her arm. “At least, ones that didn’t make me look like a fucking freak.”

Joel rested his arm on the slightly bent handlebars of the Honda. He looked across the road, gazing at the mid-morning sky showing above the forest. He didn’t turn to face her.

“That scar don’t make you a freak, Ellie. It’s just… I dunno… Proof of how lucky one kid can get, I suppose.”

“Yeah. I guess…” she muttered, and suddenly wished her long sleeved shirts weren’t drying in the sun. She tucked her scarred arm close to her body and turned it away from him. This isn’t how she meant for this conversation to go at all. “Doesn’t feel that way, though. Lucky, I mean.”

Joel turned around, the towel across over his shoulders, pulled tight at each end by his hands. He tried to hold her eye contact but she looked away. “Don’t say that, kid. You’re not a freak. Hell, you’re probably the best thing to happen to this shitty world in a long damn time. So stop beating yourself up, alright?”

“Okay. Sure.” She tried to sound positive, but was clearly struggling with it. She glanced at him but looked away quickly. “I mean… I appreciate it, Joel. Really.”

She sighed deeply and looked up at the sunlight peeking through the trees over their campsite. He wondered if there was there sadness there in her features? Resignation?

He thought about how difficult a teenage girl could be. One minute she was up, the next she was down. A person could never tell where a teenager’s head would be from one minute to the next. Add to that the invisible weight that was pressing down on her shoulders, the burden of knowing you were the cure for the plague that had destroyed Mankind and everyone was looking to you to save the world. What a fucking thing to have to live with, no matter your age.

Gotta get her to Wyoming, to Tommy, he thought, studying her, watching how fascinated she had just become with a small bird that had chosen to perch on the end of a branch nearby. Big-hearted Tommy’s gotta be better at this shit than me. I had twelve wonderful years to figure out Sarah, and she still kept surprising me.

Suddenly mindful of something, he grimaced and stalked over to his backpack. He slipped his broken watch on quickly, almost regretfully, as though he felt guilt for failing to put it on as soon as had he toweled off. He adjusted the clasp with tense fingers.

“Joel? What kind of a bird is that?” She sounded distracted, no longer quite as sad.

“Hmm? Oh. No damn idea,” He was snapped out his reverie. “Shrike of some kind, I think. Or a songbird maybe. Looks edible though.” He hoped a joke would drag her back to him.

She made a face at him. “Psssht. I’m not killing it. It’s too pretty.”

The pearly-gray and black bird began to sing. She visibly brightened.

“And we already had breakfast, Joel, so don’t get any ideas, buddy,” she said protectively, patting her cradled shotgun for emphasis. She winked.

“But what if _I’m_ hungry?” he whined with an exaggeratedly high, plaintive tone. She could tell right away that he was mocking her voice. “What about _me_ , Ellie? When’s somebody gonna think about _Joel?_ ”

_Oh, you ass! I do not sound like that._

“You can eat some grass or chew on a rock or something. That bird’s way too cute to eat. Cute is not on the menu anymore. New rule.” Her eyes twinkled when she said it. She had quickly pulled out of her funk and was clearly feeling brighter about things again.

“You think _you’re_ setting the rules now? Goddammit,” he groused dramatically. “Where’s my beating stick?”

They shared a laugh, his much more subdued than hers. A good sign.

“Thanks, Joel.” She wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her eyes were on the road, keeping watch like she was supposed to. They were as green and brimming with life as they had been earlier in the morning.

“Thanks? For what?” he griped warmly. “I didn’t do a damn thing except try to order brunch.”

“Brunch? What the heck is a brunch?”

“You just keep watch, squirt. I’m going to try and see if I can unkink the damn accelerator cable on this damn bike. It’s been sticking ever since we laid it over.”

“We? Who’s _we_? I was riding on the back, minding my own business, when all of a sudden the person I trust more than anyone in the whole wide world decided that it would be loads of fun to catapult me through the air to see how far I would fly.”

“You flew a lot farther than I thought you would.”

“I’m light,” she giggled. “Was it worth it? Do you wish you’d charge admission for the show?”

“I should have. Funniest damn thing I’ve seen in months. Can’t wait to do it again. But I have to get this bike fixed first. In a couple of hours, we’ll check if the laundry is dry. Then we’ll take the bike out on the road and see if I can shoot you further this time.”

“No hurry there.” Scanning the road carefully, not missing a thing. She wanted to impress him with her sentry skills. Show him that she wasn’t a scared teenager. She was tough. Just like him. “I’ve flown enough for a while, thanks. And the laundry can take its time drying too, for all I care. I’m starting to think of this outfit as my ‘vacation wear’. I’m in no hurry to change out of it, buddy. I’m taking it easy today.”

_Plus, going commando is kinda awesome. I’m appreciating this breeze in ways that don’t seem decent. But you must never know that, Captain NoFun._

The forest spirits summoned up another breeze for her, as if on cue. It passed across her and she smiled, feeling the gentle fingers of Mother Nature. She looked down to watch it ripple through the grass and saw the front of her thin, cotton shirt. Two bumps had appeared there, responding to the breeze.

_Okay. There’s no way to hide the fact I’m not wearing a bra, but he’ll never know about the rest._

She blushed and tried to look anywhere but his direction. Hopefully, he would return the favor and not look in hers.

“Once it starts cooling off, you’ll wish you had some sweats, like me.”

Had he seen? She was afraid to look. She turned her chest away slightly, trying to point them somewhere else, somewhere more discreet.

“Pfft. Just fix the bike, old man. You need to get to work already. I’m the only one doing my job this morning. Making breakfast. Standing guard. Jeez, feels like I’m carrying all the water around here lately.” She adopted the thickest southern drawl she could manage. “Keep this up, buckaroo, and I’m gonna have to start thinkin’ about cuttin’ you loose from this here outfit, I reckon.”

She cut her eyes at him briefly. A devious flash of green, and then they were back on the road. Back to her duties. She couldn’t suppress a smirk. She had wanted to do that for days now.

“Only people from Texas get to say ‘reckon’, Red. Them’s the rules. But I’ll let it slide this time, seein’ as you’re on vacation and all.”

“Thanks, Joel,” she nodded appreciatively at him. “Oh! And no joking, just let me know when it’s time and I’ll fold the laundry for us.”

_I hate washing it, but I'll fold it. I'm making progress. Riley would be proud._

“Thanks, kid. I appreciate it.”

“Hey, I don’t want you getting your hands all over my dainty underwear is all. I’ve heard about you old guys.”

_I can’t risk him figuring out I’m not wearing any. That’s not a lecture either one of us wants to be a part of._

“Stuff a sock in it, kiddo.”

“I would. But they’re all down by the creek at the moment.”

He went to work on the bike with his small set of tools while she kept an eye on their little camp. The bird sang prettily in the tree overhead, coaxing other birds nearby to join the chorus. Joel wanted to get back on the road, but Ellie was content to spend the rest of the day here, listening to the spirits of the forest and the music they made.

Well, about twenty minutes anyway. After a while, a forest full of birdsong starts to sound the same to a city girl’s ears.

“Hey, Joel?”

“What?”

“Did you have any luck getting the blood out of my jeans? I sure didn’t.”

“I got most of it out, I think. Used a lot of elbow grease. Hard work. That usually does the trick, in case you wanna file that tip away for next time.”

“Not my fault I have these little, girly arms. They’re just not meant for prolonged chores like scrubbing, as I was _deeply_ saddened to learn today. Tragic, you know?”

“Maybe. Or maybe you just wanted to find a way to get me to do your half of the laundry today so you could enjoy your vacation.”

“Joel, I’m shocked! And after I made us such a great breakfast!”

“The eggs were nice, yeah. You thinkin’ that makes us even for me spendin’ ten damn minutes washin’ that stain outta your jeans for you?”

“This is a partnership, Joel. We’re not keeping score.”

A moment’s pause.

“And yes,” she smirked. “Yes, I do.”

“Good one, kid. Listen. Don’t get too comfortable over there though. Just before lunch, we’re going on a supply run to that town a few miles up the road. We need to get some canned food. Get some soap too, if we can find some. Used damn near half of my last bar getting our stuff clean of all that oil and rust. Damn, what a mess that place was.”

“Supply run? On laundry day?” Genuinely surprised.

“You’re the only one here who seems to think ‘laundry day’ is a day off.”

“It was last week! And the week before that!” A case must be made for tradition.

“That don’t make it set in stone. We need stuff. No time like the present.”

“All right, all right. Can I at least enjoy my half-day off?” Bargaining.

“As long as you keep watchin’ the camp, sure. Enjoy yourself till you’re about to bust from it. Now let me work, girl. Just be quiet for a while.”

“Sure thing.” Reluctant acceptance.

A long hour passed. Ellie managed to keep her silence for him, but it was straining the limits of her willpower. There were just so many things around her that she was dying to ask him about. Sentry duty was hard when Joel was hanging around. No singing, no sick guitar riffs, no dancing – not even a little! She wondered if the time was right to break out one of her pun books. Everyone loved a good pun!

Across the road, she spied the little rabbit. He came hopping back into view on the far side of the blacktop, stopping to make eye contact with her. He seemed to hesitate for a moment on the far shoulder of the road, weighing the risk she presented. Ellie made herself as harmless as a human with a shotgun can be. After much consideration, he finally crossed the road in a few quick, easy bounds and stopped just a few feet from his little bush. He paused there, looking at the two humans who had become his next-door neighbors. For one heart-stopping moment, he looked like he might hop over to get a closer look at them.

Ellie began to whistle, hoping she could distract Joel before he saw the bunny.

“You’re gettin’ better at that, kid.” He remained fixated on the controls for the Honda. He never even glanced in the rabbit’s direction.

“Thanks, Joel.” She continued to whistle tunefully, trying to buy her little buddy time to escape down his hole hidden behind the bush, but he refused to move. She tried to weave a warning into her notes, something high and shrill, meant only for his big floppy ears.

With a flash of his white tail, the rabbit turned and disappeared into his bush.

“That’ll do, Ellie. Thanks. Hit those notes any higher and you’re gonna crack the glass in the headlight over here.”

“Sorry, Joel.”

_You owe me one, bunny. When I wake up tomorrow, there had better be a fucking carrot on my blanket._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last week we learned that my version of Ellie is a fan of pop punk enthusiast Andrew W. K. This week we learned that she also likes the Black Eyed Peas. Do I apologize for any of this? I do not. ;-)
> 
> In place of an apology, I give you warm moments of bonding between our underdressed heroes. And bunnies. 
> 
> Drop by on Saturday when Ellie and Joel take a walk through the forest in Chapter Three: Leaving Eden.


	3. Leaving Eden

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Needing replacement parts to repair their motorcycle, Joel and Ellie walk through a beautiful, abandoned nature preserve on their way to a small town where the needed items may be found. Ellie is overcome by the beauty of the place. Joel struggles with memories of his old partner.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
 **Chapter 03 – Leaving Eden**

 

That old red Nissan had been her last working truck. She’d kept it carefully stashed outside of Boston, in the little town of Weston. It was beat all to hell, looked like a wreck, and that was exactly how she liked it. The old banged up Titan 4x4 blended in nicely with all the other junk trucks rusting away behind the ice cream store. Almost five years that truck sat back there, mixed in among the other dead vehicles, perfectly disguised, ready for use whenever she needed to make a run to another town or quarantine zone. Nobody even thought to look closely at that rusty, dented piece of shit, that’s how bad it looked.

But now it really was dead. Three tires flat, all of the passenger side windows shot out, the whole passenger’s side shot all to hell, really. Three holes in the radiator. And one big rifle round right through the block. No fixing that, not even in a junkyard. Fuck Bettencourt and his turncoat crew. It was lucky for that double-crossing bastard that she had already killed him or else she would have really made him pay for leaving her on foot.

It was a damn good thing that she’d had some satisfying sex this morning, or else this would be shaping up to one hell of a shitty day.

“Almost there, Boss.”

Joel was walking just ahead of her, his big stainless steel shotgun in hand, almost as though he were on point. She noticed how his eyes were always on the move, always looking for an ambush or an opportunity. She would have to compliment him for that later. She also noticed how fine his ass was, but decided to keep that to herself. This man didn’t need any more ego stroking from her anytime soon, not after the noises she had made for him last night and this morning.

“Yeah,” Tess said, looking at the road sign he had read from. “So long as we keep to Route 126, it’s about ten miles from Natick to Lincoln. See if we can borrow a truck from this guy I know there. He’s got a few. We can get that loot we stashed in the junkyard loaded up and haul it to Boston and return the truck to him before the end of the day.”

“Friend of yours? Or competitor?” he asked. He was careful to cut the length of his stride, making it easier for her to keep up with her shorter legs. It was clear that he had traveled with women before, and she wondered a bit at that. Not jealousy so much, but curiosity. This man had a lot of history and she was beginning to realize how little she really knew about him.

Probably should have waited longer to sleep with him, she thought. But what’s done is done and I’ve got no regrets about it. Provided I’m not pregnant. God help him if I am.

“He sorta works for me, I guess you could say. He’s a scrounger, a really good one. And a good mechanic too. I think that’s what he did before the outbreak.”

“So he’ll be happy to see us?” Joel said, tossing a quick glance back at her, making sure she was keeping up. “Or at least he won’t start shootin’ at us when we get there?”

“Nah. He’s cool,” she said and then thought better of it. “Well, not _cool_ , I guess. But he knows me on sight and I’ve always been fair with him. We’re going to the usual place where he and I meet. We’ll wait for him there, until he comes out to see us.”

“Why not just go into Lincoln and look for him. We might find some good stuff in that town.”

“Safer not to. You meet him where he wants you to meet him. You don’t go into his town. No one goes into his town.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s _his_ town. It’s where he lived before the outbreak. He refused to go to the QZ, so he hid from the army during the botched evacuation, and waited until the entire town was emptied out or infected, I guess. Now he’s got the place all to himself.”

“Is he crazy?” Another backward glance, concern evident on his rugged features.

“Not… really…” she said, hedging obviously. “He’s just… well… you’ll see.”

Joel chuckled. “Sounds like a real character. How’d you meet him?”

“Long fucking story, Texas,” she laughed, sifting through the memory of that long-gone day, wondering what parts she would tell him and what parts she would keep to herself. “Oh, hey! That reminds me! Speaking of fucking, you know I’m gonna have to chop your balls off when we get back to Boston, right?”

Joel couldn’t resist looking her in the eye as he spoke. “Hey now, that ain’t my fault.”

Tess smirked, looking straight ahead, not making eye contact, knowing he was trying to get her to look at him and relishing this little moment of leverage over him. “I told you not to come inside me, Texas. And you did. _Twice_.”

“You wouldn’t let me out!” he said with good humor, jabbing a finger in her direction. “I told you I was about to… you know. And you wouldn’t uncross your legs. Lotta strength in those long legs of yours, Boss.”

She laughed and for a moment the years and the hardships fell from her. Joel was struck by how beautiful she was when she let her guard down. She had shown him her lovely vulnerability last night, as she broke out the hip flask of whiskey. But she had put the ‘tough girl’ mask back on as they were getting dressed this morning. He understood why she felt she had to, but he wished she’d let his guard down around him, just a little. Maybe later, when they were safer.

“I wasn’t thinking straight. Not my fault, Joel. I was counting on you to be the sensible one.”

“And the first time?” he said, holding up an accusing finger to bolster his point. “You were on top, sittin’ in my lap, as I recall. So don’t even try to pin that one on me.”

“I’m willing to let that one go, maybe. But the second one? You’re big and strong. You shoulda overpowered me, tossed me across the room. Shot that stuff someplace other than _inside my fucking cunt_ , you inconsiderate jackass.” She tried to sound mean, but she couldn’t disguise the humor behind her words.

“Not like that’s a trigger a man can unpull, Tess.” He smiled lopsidedly and turned his eyes back to the road. Just over a mile and a half to go now. “I pretty much tried to get out of there. I surely meant to get around to it. I’d just about swear to it in a court of law.”

She laughed at his increasingly weak excuses for the mistakes they’d made. She wished her laugh didn’t sound quite so much like a girlish giggle, but it struck his ears quite pleasantly.

“I’m taking that into consideration. But I’m not sure you really put much effort into trying to avoid it, big man. If I find out I’m pregnant, I’m gonna have to cut them off. A promise is a promise. Hell, I may cut ‘em off anyway since I’m your boss now. Those balls are on my payroll. Those balls belong to me now. Company property.”

“Lordy, Tess. Talk like that, it’s a wonder you get any man to work for you.”

“I pay well. Lotsa fringe benefits too,” she said, chiding him affectionately. “You may have noticed that. And did you happen to see the way I let you come on my tits this morning? I’m trying to show you how I like things done, what I expect from my employees, see? From now on, my pussy has a sign on it that reads ‘No Deposits’, understand?”

“Jesus, Tess!” he laughed, a little shocked that she would talk about bedroom stuff so casually, especially outdoors like this. She was a hell of an interesting woman, this one.

He stopped suddenly. She took another full step before halting. His arm came up on its own, acting like a barricade, protecting her, corralling her. She resented it as much as she appreciated it.

“What –“ she started to say, her mouth clamping the sentence short as she heard the distant rumble of diesel engines. “Oh fuck! The army!”

They dashed towards an old Dunkin’ Donuts, just off the road, racing across the parking lot filled with broken and busted cars, praying that no infected were hiding inside. They huddled close together in the shadowy interior, behind the broken front window. The engines sounded like distant thunder, bouncing off the surrounding buildings, echoing and amplifying the noise until it was impossible to know where the sound was coming from.

“There,” she whispered, though it was unnecessary. There was no way the sound of her voice would carry to the soldiers’ ears over the sound of those big engines. “See it?”

He nodded. Only a blind man could have missed that convoy.

A trio of Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles led the way. A larger M1 tank followed behind. In its wake were numerous M35 cargo trucks and Humvees.

“Look at the markings on the sides,” she said. “They’re out of Vermont. Montpelier QZ, from the looks of it.”

“Think the quarantine zone there is fallin’?”

“That’d be my bet.”

An eclectic mix of SUVs, step vans, pickup trucks and school buses, all painted black, made up the bulk of the convoy. Those vehicles that weren’t packed with crates and drums of fuel and irreplaceable military weapons and supplies were crammed with more easily replaced army personnel and the families of a few, higher-ranking members. Several long, silver, corporate passenger vans, each bearing the FEDRA logo, cruised along behind the buses, the important people inside riding in comparative luxury compared to everyone else in the convoy. Each van had a well-armed Humvee escorting it.

“Fuck, looks like half the damn Montpelier battalion is in those buses,” she groused. “Boston’s doing well, but we took in a bunch of people from Albany, year before last. Boston’s pretty much full up by this point. How the fuck are we supposed to feed all of these assholes?”

“City’s gonna be on half rations for a while, I guess,” Joel shrugged, nonplussed. It wasn’t as though he and Tess were actually on the citizenship roster for Boston. Forged ID cards got them through checkpoints, but they were on their own for food and shelter. They ate better and slept in softer beds because of it and never had to worry about being selected for work details. Anybody dumb enough to live on the level in Boston all nice and legal deserved to go hungry, as far as he was concerned. “Least there are no civilians in the mix. Fewer mouths for us to feed than it coulda been.”

“You’re right about that,” she agreed. It was a dog eat dog world and she liked to eat. Not her fault that those sorry bastards back in Vermont got stuck in an isolated QZ. Stupid place to build one anyway. Not enough fresh water rivers to support the place with fish. Not next to an ocean, like Boston. They only reason the government went with Montpelier instead of Burlington, which was on the coast of Lake Champlain, had been an entirely political one. Somebody’s ego wanted the QZ in the capitol, where the ‘old boys network’ was entrenched, and now all those voters, those poor suckers who’d been ordered to report there for safety years ago, were being left to die because the supplies had finally run out and the ‘old boys’ were running for the safety of Boston.

“Hell,” he continued, “those fuckers up ahead are pretty lucky. You just know there were at least a few platoons stuck holdin’ the angry citizens back long enough for that convoy to get away. Angry mob’s probably torn those poor bastards apart by now.”

“Yeah. You’re probably right. If I were in that mob, that’s what I’d be doing. Those soldiers back there have gotta run out of bullets sooner or later, and they’ve got nowhere to go now. Probably isn’t a working army truck or tank left in that QZ. That convoy is probably everything they had that would make the trip.”

“Saw somethin’ just like it happen in Memphis, years ago,” he said, his mind going to a dark place. “Shit wasn’t pretty, I can tell you that.”

Next came several big eighteen wheelers pulling slab-sided cargo trailers. Three tanker trucks, mostly likely filled with gasoline, and a long, flatbed truck with a Kiowa scout helicopter secured to it by cargo straps trundled along behind the big rigs. Several more Humvees and Bradleys orbited around these big tractors and their precious cargo.

“That explains those helicopters we heard this morning,” she said. “First aircraft I’ve heard up there in three or four years.”

“Yeah. Guess they couldn’t get that one up in the air. Must be pretty close to fixable or else they woulda just left it behind.”

“But Route 20? They’re taking a hell of a roundabout way to get from Vermont to here,” she said.

“Most of the main highways are probably blocked or too busted up to get a convoy of that size through. Hell, I can tell you from personal experience that Claremont and Lebanon are so blasted apart, you can barely get through ‘em on foot. Passed through there on my way here ‘bout three years back. Real fuckin’ mess, Boss.”

“Yeah. Allentown’s the same damn way. Harrisburg too,” she grumbled. “Fucking Air Force. I think they were just bombing towns to bomb them by the end. Guess they had more bombs than jet fuel, so they didn’t want to run out of one before they ran out of the other.”

Joel chuckled darkly. So did she. If you couldn’t laugh about those last days, as the old institutions flailed in vain trying to hold back the end, then you’d probably cry. And if you started crying over all that had been lost, you might never stop. Better to laugh.

A motley, flat-black collection of short-bed cargo vans guarded by Humvees and a few additional Bradley IFVs were coming along now, part of the seemingly endless rolling procession. It would take a while for the entire convoy to pass them by and move on to a safe distance, out of sight. They sat behind the wall, Joel and Tess, looking around at the ruined shop, trying to remember a time when donuts and coffee were plentiful.

“I’d kill for a jelly donut, Texas. And that’s no lie.”

“Damn, I tell ya, I’d just about do the same for some coffee, boss.”

”I got some, if you want it. Later, when we get back to Boston, I mean.”

“Really? You’ve got coffee, Tess?” He sounded surprised and impressed.

She felt a little smug and her smile reflected it. She quirked her lips, hit him with her best daring eyes, challenging him, feeling as cocky as he had earlier.

“Sure. Not a ton or anything, but a can or two. Freeze dried and sealed tight. I could be… talked… into sharing some of it with you. _Maybe_. If you’re good.”

“Thanks.” From the look on his face, he was caught off guard when he learned there was a price attached to each and every cup she was going to let him have. He seemed pleased.

“But you’re gonna have to share a little too.” She was studying him closely now, wanting to see how he would react. She should have seen it coming, really.

“Like last night, you mean? Hell, boss, I’d do that for free.” He winked. It pissed her off and turned her on a little. Joel was not a man lacking in self-confidence. “You don’t have to bribe me with coffee. For you, I’m up for that kind of work anytime, Tess.”

She looked away, shook her head, mildly disappointed in him. He was not complex, this man. For all the mystery and intrigue that swirled in his wake, he was just as simple as the rest of his kind. She pursed her lips and made a deliberate decision to not let this bother her. Not today. It’s not as though it was his fault that she had expected a little more of him.

“Don’t be an ass, Joel. I’m thinking about bringing you into my organization full time. But I like to know the people I work with,” she groused, trying to be friendly again. She returned her eyes to him, coming back to her earlier point, letting go, starting again. “So let’s start with the basics. Who are you? Where did you get that sexy drawl? Where you come from? What did you do, before the outbreak happened?”

He was quiet for a little bit, pretending to watch the convoy passing by down the street, but not really seeing them. His eyes were unfocused, somewhere in the past. That was ridiculously obvious. She was willing to bet he was a lousy liar. She would have to do all the talking when they did business with other people, but she had been planning on doing that anyway.

It occurred to her that he was happy to keep things on the surface, but he was going to fight like hell to keep from letting her in.

Happy to screw, not so ready to talk.

She could understand that. She had serious problems trusting people too. Hell, she didn’t really like placing her trust in anyone. Not until yesterday, not until the shootout in the junkyard with the double-dealing scavs. Not until this man came roaring into her life in an explosion of violence and bravado and… what exactly?

She abruptly realized that she was falling for him, just a little bit. Mostly from what happened between them last night but also from the way he didn’t turn tail and run when the shit hit the fan in the junkyard, the way most new hires did. This one was different, he was brave as hell, strong and quick, sure. That was why she hired him in the first place. But he just seemed to ‘get’ her somehow. Didn’t push her to do things his way, a common mistake with hired guns that had experience. Didn’t suck up to her or try to curry her favor. He had been a boss at some point, ran his own crew, she was sure of it. He knew that the person in charge made the call and everyone else had to back that play or get the fuck out. He had backed her decisions at every step of the way yesterday, even when he was sure something about the deal with Bettencourt was rotten. He had mentioned it once, she had dismissed it as jitters on his part, and he had kept quiet about it after that. He didn’t rub it in her face later when it was clear to both of them that he had been right, like she had half-expected him to do. She had misjudged him both times.

He made a great enforcer, but she was starting to wonder if he might make a great partner too. And in more than just one sense of the word. She wanted to keep this one around. She knew it was stupid but decided she was going to just go ahead with it anyway. He was having an effect on her and nobody had really done that in a while. She cleared her throat softly to let him know she was waiting.

“You first, boss,” he said.

“Gonna be that way about it, huh?” She smirked, shrugged, as though insubordination was a thing that he wasn’t going to pay for later. She made a mental note of this transgression and filed it away for another argument, another day. “Okay. I’m game.”

“I’m from Alton, Missouri. Just outside of St. Louis,” she began cautiously, wary of revealing too much of herself to this man, already feeling a mild, simmering resentment forming, intuiting that he was almost certainly going to choose to share less about himself than she did, probably just to be a dick about things. “I was in middle school when the outbreak happened. So, no, I never graduated high school, and no, you do not get to make fun of me for that. I’m still one of the most successful smugglers in Boston. And you work for me. So there.”

She said it like a little kid scoring a point against a grown up – ultimately pointless, but a moral victory nonetheless. She poked him with one finger to drive home her point. They shared a subdued laugh about it. Even though she knew it really shouldn’t, her lack of higher education had always bothered her, enough so that she wanted to get it out there and defuse it as soon as possible. For Joel’s part, he had never liked school all that much. High school was very overrated, he would later tell her.

The last vehicles of the large convoy had finally rumbled away out of sight. The streets were quiet again. They left the cover of the old donut shop and she continued the story as they resumed their walk to Lincoln.

She told him about her older brother, away in the army at the time of the outbreak, somewhere overseas. She had no idea what had happened to him. She told him about moving cross-country with her father and uncle, and what had happened to each of those men as she made their way to Boston, to an aunt who had promised to wait for them, the same aunt who had promised to use her government connections to get them inside, the same aunt who had been dead for two years by the time her fifteen-year-old niece had finally arrived. She kept each part of the story brief, as impersonal as possible. There would be more time to go into detail later. Maybe. Depending on how things went with him in the next few days.

“What about you?” she said at the conclusion of her story. “All I know about you is what you told me in my office. You came up from Texas and you needed work. Gotta be more to you than that, Joel.”

“Grew up in Texas, around Austin, with my brother Tommy. We worked construction together after high school.”

She had seen Joel talking to a large blonde man on the street outside her office on the day she hired the big Texan. She had thought at the time that there was a family resemblance between the two. Looking back on it, she should have known it would go this way. Why else would she have gone to the hallway window just to watch this man walk down the street as he left?

“You were a contractor? Good money in that as I recall.”

“Not yet. I was workin’ for a contractor. He made most of the money. I was lookin’ into ways to go into business for myself. Readin’ up on it a lot. Then the world went to shit.” He shrugged. “Never did take those books back to the library. That’s why I can never go back to Austin. Those late fees are hell, you know?”

She laughed. This man had a very dry sense of humor. He smirked, pleased that he made her laugh but not willing to laugh along with her. She was right about him. This man was a little bit of a jerk. Most of the really interesting men she had known were.

“That’s it?” she asked. “No other family?”

His answer was a long time coming. “… Not… really… Not that I wanna talk about, yeah?”

“Okay, fine. Be that way,” she said, taking little comfort in knowing her prediction that he would share less than her had come true. She extended an olive branch all the same. “You wanna talk about it later, we can.”

Tess was a tough, no-nonsense woman, but she still held out some small hope that the world didn’t have to be a cold, bitter place all the time. It couldn’t hurt to at least try to make some kind of connection with this man, to try and reach for something beyond their own physical needs. She couldn’t know that by they time he would be ready for such things, she would have largely closed her own heart off to him as a means of self-defense against more than six years of his coldness. Given more time, they might have been able to reconcile, to find a way to make it work. But time was not on her side. She could not be blamed for not knowing this. No one can. No one ever knows.

”Thanks,” he said, only barely meeting her eyes. “Might take you up on that one of these days. Have to think about it awhile.”

She suspected he was lying but let it slide. One distant future night, with enough liquor in him, it will all come out at once, like an emotional logjam breaking inside his heart. Lying naked in bed with her, he will cry. Actually cry. She will hold him, and cry with him, and fall in love with him. The next day he will hate her for it, and her love for him will die. For a while, at least. But not today. Today he is still keeping his secrets, and she is still falling in love, slowly, despite her best efforts to put the brakes on. Neither of them can help what they are, but time is not on their side.

“No problem, Texas. We all got our secrets.”

He gave a hard, short laugh. The kind of laugh that either meant he had it all figured out or that he just didn’t give a damn about anything. She wasn’t sure. She had heard that laugh a few times in the last couple of days, and she was already coming to hate it. She also found it sexy in a way, and that made her hate it all the more.

She passed him a cigarette from her last pack. Only four left. She didn’t mind sharing with him. Certain things, anyway. Everyone had their secrets, after all. They would smoke the last two tonight, in her bed. She had an old Zippo lighter with the Playboy bunny head logo engraved on its case. She flicked it open and lit his smoke. He saw the logo and raised an eyebrow slyly.

“What? I posed for Playboy when I was younger. So what? Don’t judge me,” she grinned, naughty and charming in a way that was driving him crazy, though he hid it well enough. The truth of it was that it had been her beloved Uncle’s lighter. It was all she had left of him.

“What month and what year?” he winked. “I gotta start huntin’ around for that issue.”

“You dumbass. I told you, I was _thirteen years old_ when the outbreak hit,” she laughed merrily, glad to have scored a point against him. “See if you can spot the problems with a thirteen-year-old girl posing for Playboy magazine. Dipshit.”

“So that issue’s gonna be a little hard to find, I reckon?” He winked. “Hef kept those photos for himself then?”

“Pervert,” she giggled and he loved the girlishness of the sound, the almost shy look on her face. She almost blushed. He was having an effect on her. They both knew it. She resolved to tighten the screws down on her emotions for a while. Falling in love was dangerous enough for her. Getting there too fast was just begging to get stupid. And stupid gets you killed.

Ahead, far down the street, near a sturdy, cobbled-together barricade, a husky, well-armed man stepped out of the deep shadows behind an old moving van. A shotgun and a machete were across his back, an AK-47 was in his hands. A pair of hand grenades hung from the few empty loops on his heavily laden bandolier of shotgun ammo. The pistol grip of a small propane cutting torch poked out of a heavy canvas satchel on his hip. He nodded in a greeting. His hands never left his lowered rifle, not even to wave. His eyes never left Joel, not even to look at Tess.

“Don’t go for your gun, Joel.” Softly, cautioning. These two men might not get along.

“You know him?” Wary, bristling, seemingly sensing someone as stubborn as himself.

“That’s Bill. My best scavenger. He’s… uh… well, he’s _Bill_. So let me do the talking, okay? At least until he gets to know you a little. Or maybe a lot. Just follow my lead, okay?”

“Sure thing, Boss.” If Tess wanted to talk, that was fine by him. Joel wasn’t much for unnecessary words and he never wanted to be in charge of anything, ever again. Not after the mess in Delaware. He was happy to let Tess do all the talking. She was good at it. Tess _liked_ to talk.

 

* * *

 

Ellie _loved_ to talk. She never shut up.

She was reading aloud from the giant placard on the observation balcony overlooking the lake. It was covered in old bird shit and twenty years of dirt, muck, and dead leaves. Two rags from her pack had been sacrificed so that she could recover this long lost knowledge and now she knew she had a sacred duty to share it. She spoke slowly, carefully, in what Joel thought of as her ‘teacher voice’, her arms crossed, one small hand was stroking her little, round chin in a gesture that she thought made her look very professorial. She was giving an important lecture, and he was the only student in attendance.

“Joel, did you know that the Big Darby Headwaters Nature Preserve is 800 acres in size and is largely a mixture of wetlands and streamside forests. This lake you see here is formed where coldwater springs and streams emerge, pooling together in these naturally occurring lowlands, making the lake wide, but not dangerously deep. A man of average height can safely wade across most of it. This lake is fed by an intricate network of nourishing capillaries, which are the lifeblood of Big Darby Creek’s permanent flow downstream, just south of this large body of water.”

“Uh huh.”

He was sitting down on one of the concrete benches.

“And did you know that these majestic waters are fed by a complex network of underground seeps. Taken together, these small water sources combine to contribute millions of gallons of clean, cold water to tributary streams of both this lake and the length of Big Darby Creek itself.”

“Alright then.”

He was digging through his backpack.

“Also, Joel, I’d like to point out that the headwater streams, the floodplains, the forests and wetlands we see around us are important for both their contribution to the water quality of Big Darby, but also because they provide an important, protected habitat for the rich biodiversity of plants and animals that you can see here year round.”

“If you say so.”

He was unfolding the map.

“There’s also a gift store at the end of this path, by the exit to the parking lot. We should consider buying a souvenir to remember our time here at the lovely and scenic Big Darby Headwaters Nature Preserves.”

“Ellie, please shut up.”

He was sitting there, studying the open map.

“Education is important, Joel. I want to share the gift of knowledge with you.” She smiled, sounding very much like a schoolteacher from one of those fancy private schools that he had always wanted to send Sarah too, but could never afford. Ellie was glancing sideways at him. Her eyes twinkled. He knew she enjoyed teasing him and wasn’t doing it to be annoying. It was just her way. Humor and talking was how she liked to connect with him. Tess liked silence and fucking. Joel liked Tess’s way better.

Tess.

He sighed softly. Digging up the past again. And trying to put up with this kid. It was a lot.

He was _trying_. Lord knows he was. He decided to try just a little harder. This kid was really pulling her weight around here lately. And he had finally been able to push those… desires… down. He wasn’t seeing her that way today and it felt safe to talk to her again. Safer, anyway. Whatever unspeakable urges she had awakened in him that night in the Motel 6, when he was high as a kite on booze and painkillers, he had finally stuffed them down and buried them deep. And, thankfully, he was certain she had no idea that he had even had those thoughts about her in the first place.

“It’s always good to learn new things, Joel.”

“I know. That’s why I’m lookin’ at the map, Miss Ellie, new teacher in town.”

She giggled. “Williams.”

“How’s that?” He looked over the top of the map at her. She was smiling brightly.

“Williams. That’s my name. Ellie Williams.”

“Hmh,” said Joel, not a word at all, not even much of a sound really, not sure if he was comfortable with this new knowledge about her, not sure what the reason for it his discomfort might be, and not wanting to give it any thought. Not while the bike needed fixing.

“What’s yours?” She asked, coming over to him, smiling, friendly, her hands behind her back. She seemed just a little bit shy but also excited, as though there was a door open in front of her and she couldn’t wait to see what was on the other side.

He blinked a few times, studying the smooth shape of her innocent face intently. Whatever feelings he was experiencing at the moment, he shook them away and forged ahead, trying to put this unexpected personal moment behind them.

“I’m tryin’ to find the best way to that town up ahead. Seein’ if we can get from our side of this park to the town without havin’ to get back on the highway. That’s too far in the wrong direction, and too close to Marysville. Wild horses couldn’t drag me back there.”

She sighed, just a little sadly; disappointed that he wouldn’t share something as simple as his name with her. She plastered a smile on her face and decided to follow the path he was blazing. Her hands were in front of her belly, her fingers tugging at one another. She tried to sound unfazed, tried to be funny for him.

“Town? All I see is a lake and a bunch of little rivers. Creeks,” she corrected herself, using the word he preferred. “Whatever. So where’s the town? Did it sink under the water? Like Atlantis? Or is it hidden in the marsh, forgotten to the mists of time? Are there ghosts there? A crazy caretaker? A long-lost cult of evil mutant fish people? Man! This is so spooky!”

He chuckled though he tried not to. Encouraging her was usually a bad idea. Back in Pittsburgh, he had made the mistake of laughing at a few of the jokes she told him from her old joke books, and now she told them all the time.

She sat down next to him, excited now, wanting to look at the map with him. “ _Come on!_ Where’s this lost city with the evil zombie fishmen? Tell me. Ugh. Stop sucking and being all mysterious and shit, Joel. We’re _partners!_ ”

“If you’ll give me a minute to _read the damn map_ , I’ll be happy to tell you, ‘pardner’,” he muttered, not grumpy with her despite his words. Not very much, anyway.

She fell silent, hands clasped in her lap, looking around. Smiling, happy to be acknowledged as his partner, even sarcastically. Wide-eyed, studying the surrounding beauty with innocent wonder. Beautiful, filled with joy to be with this man. She stayed silent as long as she could, questions and jokes and clever observations welling up inside her until she could bear it no longer. She drummed her hands on the edge of the bench, gripped her knees, and all words came tumbling out again.

“So how’s it coming, Joel? Found it yet?”

“I’m done. I know where we are. Figured it out a few minutes ago. I just wasn’t sayin’ anything. Just sittin’ here with a map in my hands, daydreamin’, and enjoyin’ the silence. I guess I wanted to see how long you could keep quiet. About three minutes, give or take. I’m impressed.”

“Oooohohoho,” she groused sweetly. Her words came out in a single, soft, unbroken exhalation. “ _You-are-such-a-dick-to-me-I-swear_.”

“This way, squirt. Come on.” He stood up and gave her the map to fold, which she did with nimble little fingers. She loved to help.

Their bike was parked on the far side of the preserve, near the western edge, hidden beneath the camouflage netting, in the forest off the little road that connected the park with the access roads and I-33 to the north. The road they needed was all the way on the other side of the preserve. It was a long, scenic walk. Ellie was awestruck by the beauty of the place, and even grumpy old Joel let out a whistle or two in appreciation of a few particularly stunning vistas. It had been a very pretty park twenty years ago, but unchecked nature had allowed it to become something magical.

A dense forest, a few fallen trees, a million purple and white flowers. A thick blanket of grass, a heavy canopy of leaves. Too many little streams and creeks to count, all feeding into one big lake.

A big open field, a sea of tall grasses and wildflowers. They were almost up to Ellie’s chest. She felt like she was wading through a deep ocean of green. Blue sky overhead. Ducks quacking contentedly somewhere to their left, beyond the grass, paddling around in hidden water.

Joel held the hunting rifle high as he walked, keeping it above the wet grass. She noticed him doing this, and did the same thing with her shotgun.

Across the field, hiding behind a line of trees, an old pea gravel trail that was mostly overgrown, but still barely detectable in the dense woods. Moss on the many trunks, birds nesting above. A million songs drifted down through the branches. A small doe dashed across the trail ahead and disappeared into the morning mists.

_Holy fuck, the outdoors are awesome._

“This place is so fucking beautiful, Joel.” She had to share the thought. It was too much to hold inside. She was bursting with every good emotion. A butterfly flitted past her and she wanted to dance with Joel in the field of flowers.

“It’s pretty.” Joel clearly had a better control on his emotions. She admired that.

“Yeah.” Soft, breathy, overwhelmed. Part of her wanted to stay here forever, stay here with him, together.

She remembered the old preacher’s bullshit words about the Garden of Eden and suddenly wondered if he might have been on to something. Silly as the story sounded to her, she’d always wanted to believe that such a place might actually have existed, somewhere, back before the world filled up with people. And now, here it was. She suddenly wanted to strip off her clothes and run through the forest. Naked, with him, here, forever. Start the world over again, just the two of them. The old world is gone, let it go. Begin again, build it up from scratch. One man. One woman. Find a way to get things right this time. A wonderful, tingling warmth began to coalesce inside her, a hot ember just below her belly.

“Yeah,” she repeated even more softly.

Soon enough, the little trail led them to an enclosed pathway running parallel to an overgrown access road. The fenced-in area was marked with prominent ‘Employees Only’ signs every hundred feet or so. The scenic trail they were on seemed to wind off into dense forest of the park for what seemed like miles. Who knew how long it would take them to work their way around to the exit. When they happened upon a locked gate set in the side of the fence, he gave her a quick boost over. Her shoes were wet from all the damp grass they were swishing through, and she couldn’t find purchase. But the fence wasn’t very tall, so he placed his hands on the soles of her shoes and lifted her up as she gripped the top of the fence.

“Ooh!” she said happily. “This is much easier.”

She slipped over the top, twisted around easily on top of smooth metal frame, and lowered herself down.

“Sweet. Like an elevator,” she grinned, suddenly remembering the story Riley had told her about her day inside the FEDRA building. “I should get you to do most of the work all the time.”

“Thought I already was,” he grumped playfully.

“Ha! You wish!” she snorted, her brow furrowing after a quick look at the latch. “There’s a padlock, Joel. And _somebody_ still hasn’t taught me to shiv a lock. So…”

He stepped back. The road they needed was just beyond the second, higher fence on the other side of this shorter one, and the day was already half over. Sometimes you just had to take shortcuts. He told her what he wanted her to do. She nodded and took out her pistol.

She shot the old padlock off with two bullets from her Beretta. He didn’t like making that kind of noise, but she didn’t have the physical strength to pry it loose with a tool. What was done, was done. He stepped through the gate and she bowed deeply as he came through.

“Thank you for visiting Big Darby Park today, sir.” She spoke very formally. “Please stop at the gift shop on the way out.”

He chuckled. “Thanks. I will.”

“Sweet! I want a t-shirt.”

“Come on, kiddo. Let’s find the gate to this big fence here and we can hit the road and get to that town while there’s still plenty of daylight.”

“Lead the way, boss.”

The little, enclosed ‘employees only’ path was much more direct. It cut a straight path through the park, leaving the overgrown tourist path to meander off into the woods and disappear. Part of her was sad that she didn’t get the full Big Darby Headwaters Nature Preserve experience. Joel set a quick pace, and she hustled to keep up. She didn’t want to leave, even as she fell into a trot to say close to him. She felt like she was being expelled from the Garden of Eden. It was a stupid thought, but she couldn’t help but feel that way about it.

_Let’s go back, Joel. Fuck the Fireflies. Fuck the world. Let’s say we tried and just go back and stay in that forest together, forever._

“Why are we going so fast?” she said, breathing quickly but evenly. A year spent running around the Boston QZ at night with Riley, dodging patrols and staying one step ahead of smugglers – Riley had hinted more than once that you could never tell a smuggler from a slaver until it was too late – had left Ellie in very good shape.

“We’re fenced in, kiddo,” he said, also breathing evenly. She was impressed that a man his age was in such good condition. She knew he had an incredible amount of stamina, but hearing him breathing smoothly, steadily, exerting himself over distance like this, made funny little ripples of liquid heat twist and turn inside her. She wanted to run for miles with him like this, just to listen to that sound he made. “If we run into trouble in here, we’re screwed. So let’s get out from between these fences PDQ, okay?”

“PDQ?” she repeated, falling into an easy stride behind him.

“Pretty damn quick,” he said, breathing steadily, his voice husky with the effort of jogging. His left arm was on the stock of his shotgun, holding it in place against his flank as it bounced lightly from the leather sling on his shoulder. The hunting rifle was in his right hand, held by the foregrip, the big gun swinging back and forth smoothly as he ran. There was a pleasing, pumping rhythm to it that excited Ellie. She blushed at the thoughts that began to form inside her head.

“Ah. Good idea,” she said, curious if he was listening to her breathing too, wondering if he enjoyed the sounds she made. She doubted it, but she liked to pretend he could think of her like that.

_I’m being dumb. He doesn’t see me like that. There’s no way. He isn’t listening to me panting and sweating behind him._

He was.

Moving at a quick trot, they reached the main parking lot of the park in fairly short order. The tall gate leading out to the parking lot was locked. They took a minute to catch their breath. She grinned, teased him about being in good shape for a man his age. He tried not to smile and told her to not to ‘sell him short’. He was still plenty strong for an ‘old fart’ and what would a ‘little squirt’ like her know about it anyway. She tried hard not to blush and pushed her bangs out of her face. He had no idea how much she thought he was capable of, how much she was expecting from him one day.

“Come on, squirt. We gotta get out of here.” He placed his back to the gate. “Up and over, kiddo.”

She placed her shotgun in the tall grass by his feet, not propping it up against the fence, just the way he had taught her to do. Gun safety was a big thing with him and, by extension, a big deal for her too. He made a step out of his interlaced fingers, she placed her small hands on his broad shoulders and slid her little foot into his big hands. The fence was very tall, twelve feet or so. It would require a big boost to get her up there. She looked at him, smiled and nodded. She was ready. With a sharp, husky whuff, he propelled her up the side of the high fence. Ellie reached out with strong, sure fingers, grunted, grabbing on to the top metal bar of the tall fence, her hands straining as she pulled herself up the last couple of feet, her shoes digging fruitlessly for toeholds in the tiny, diamond-shaped gaps of the chain-link fence. Her feet were very wet from all the damp grass they had walked through and they slid uselessly against the slick metal. He grabbed her shoes and helped push her up, lifting her as high as he could – the fence was twice his height. She stretched her leg out, slipped one ankle over the top of the metal frame, groaned deeply, levering herself higher using the muscles in her bruised thigh, straddled the top of the high fence, squeaked in discomfort, pivoted as smoothly as she could across it, and began to lower herself down. Her feet slipped uselessly against the fence as she tried to ease herself down a bit before dropping the rest of the way. She couldn’t find any footing in the metal links and her small arms began to tremble from the exertion of holding herself up. She was stretched out almost to her full length, writhing and grunting against the fence. Joel wanted to look away. She was practically right in front of him, her t-shirt twisted up high around her torso, snug around her breasts, her thermal shirt untucked, her bare belly just above his head, pressed against the interlocked wire. He tried to look away, tried not to listen to her gasping and groaning. He tried to not hear the almost erotic quality in those sounds. He really tried.

“Fuck!” she yelped as her fingers finally gave out.

She slipped off the top of the fence frame, dropping fast to the ground, her wet shoes sliding out from underneath her as she landed on the blacktop. She fell back on her butt.

“Ouch! Fuck!” She rubbed her tailbone, blushing. After all the spills she had taken lately, she was sure he would start seeing her as a klutz. She grimaced at the thought of it. She wanted to be cool, like he was, like Riley had been. Cool and tough and sexy like Tess, his previous partner. If she couldn’t be any of those things, she wanted to be a good sidekick, at least. And good sidekicks could handle something as simple as a fucking fence without falling flat on their asses.

“You okay?” He was pressed against the fence, a safe place to be now that she wasn’t twisting against it, making those sounds. He wished he could reach out to her, help her up.

“Yeah. I think so.” She adjusted her bra, tugged her shirt into place, looked down at the blacktop, away from him. She puckered her lips and blew out a long breath. She leaned back on her arms, stretched out her sore legs, her shoes squeaking just a little on the slick pavement.

_Fuck, that was embarrassing. Very smooth, Ellie._

He was struck by how long her legs seemed to be from this vantage point. He wished she would close them a bit. The smooth curves of her thighs drew his eyes naturally up… towards the junction of her legs… towards her…

“Still hurtin’ from yesterday?” he asked, blinking hard, reminding himself to look at her face before she caught him looking anywhere else. His fingers wrapped themselves around the links of the fence. He didn’t like her being out of reach. This was a dangerous world and they both knew it.

“Yeah. A little.” She stood up slowly, feeling every bit of stiffness that had been hammered into her muscles the day before.

She groaned, twisting around, rubbing her bottom. He wished it wasn’t mostly pointed in his direction when she did that.

“I was doing okay until you threw me over the fence like an old beer can.” She tried to make a joke of it. That was just her way. "Owww. Shit."

“Shit, kid. Maybe you _should_ have stayed in camp today,” he said. From the tone of his voice, he was worried. She was sure of it.

There was enough concern in his voice to make the pain go away just a bit. She smiled, a little. He had offered to let her stay in camp today because of her limp. She had really taken a beating at the Battle of Fort Overpass (as she now insisted on calling it), but she had assured him that she was just fine. She wasn’t. But a nice, fat pill from the bottle of painkillers they’d found in the smugglers’ rusty camp was helping to alleviate much of it. Still, aches and pains can be persistent things.

“Ah, I can walk it off,” she said, straightening up and pretending it didn’t hurt half as much as it really did. She wiped her hands gingerly on her denim jeans and tried to look as though it were no big deal. She rubbed lightly at the big bruise on her thigh.

_Fuck that guy and his wrench. I can’t believe that bastard didn’t break my damn leg._

“You can walk off a bruise like that? I’m impressed, kid. Damn thing’s so big it’s gonna be around a while. You oughta think about givin’ it a name.” He crossed his arms, chuckled, a little pleased with himself when he saw the smile the joke brought to her face.

She laughed, tickled that Joel could surprise her sometimes. She had decided that she loved him and sharing little moments like this with him made her less afraid of her feelings.

_Fuck, you are awesome, Joel. So sexy and so fucking awesome._

“Yeah. I’m pretty awesome, dude,” she beamed, switching to her best Texas drawl. “Bruises don’t bother me none, pardner. I’m an ornery little cowgirl.”

He was willing to play along. “As I recall, the whole back of your thigh is purple and yellow under those jeans. Don’t know how you ain’t walkin’ with a limp today. It’s mighty impressive, Two-Gun Kid.”

“Joel! God! Stop checking out my legs, you perv. Jeez! I’m gonna stop wearing my shorts around you on laundry day if you’re gonna be like this.” She giggled, blushed, wanting to be mock-outraged but appearing cute and coy instead.

“Ellie.” Joel wasn’t in the mood to be teased like this today, not with so many shameful thoughts bouncing around in his brain. Not when he’d been sneaking glances at her legs as much as he had today. Not that she would even suspect, he told himself.

She balked slightly from the stern, cautioning tone of his voice, caught off guard by how quickly the conversation had gotten away from her, but she tried to keep at least some small part of her smile in place. He hated weakness. She couldn’t allow herself to appear meek or scared in front of him, even if she was feeling that way. Just a little bit. The other side of the fence was sort of a scary place to be.

”Okay, okay,” she said, placating him. “I was just _joking_ , Joel.”

_There’s a whole lot of ‘no fun’ in this man._

There’s a whole lot of woman in that girl, he thought guiltily.

“I know, Ellie. But you shouldn’t say things like that.” He shrugged. That should be obvious to her, but she still kept doing it. If she had any idea the sorts of thoughts she dredged up in the depths of his head when she said stuff like that, he knew she’d be scared of him. Repulsed by him. Damn it, he was certain he had buried these sick thoughts. But here they were, coming up again. His mind kept playing back the sounds of her grunting and groaning as she hung from the fence, the sight of her tight stomach flexing against the wire links.

Why the fuck am I so sick like this, he asked himself. It’s just come on me all of a sudden. I never looked at girls her age like this before. Damn it. She ain’t _safe_ around me.

“Don’t blame me. Charles put me up to it.”

“Who?” He snapped out the self-hating funk he had momentarily slipped into.

“Charles. The bruise. You told me to name him,” she said, coming to the fence to talk to him. He shook his head in amusement as she looked up at him as sincerely as she could. She whispered to him, keeping her voice as low as she could. “He tells me to do all kinds of things, Joel. He thinks I should get a tattoo. And he tells me I need to start doing drugs, because drugs are cool and I want to be cool too, right? I don’t know how long I can hold out against this kind of peer pressure, Joel.”

“Ellie…” He was amused, but she needed to get her butt in gear and open the gate.

“Shh! Keep your voice down! He’ll hear you!” She grinned, working on the latch of the gate. “Charles is out cold from all the painkillers and I don’t wanna wake him up. He’s _mean_ when he’s drunk. I’m scared of him.”

He hid the humor in his voice as best as he could. “Knock it off, you little turd, and open the gate already.”

“Damn,” she giggled, tugging hard on the latch. “I thought I could come to you for help. But you’re just gonna send me back to Charles. He’s gonna beat me when he wakes up, I just know it.”

He snorted, smiled, exhaled, and looked off into the distance, wondering where the hell this weird kid got all these goofy thoughts. He wished she’d just say as much crazy stuff as she liked and not say that flirty shit. She didn’t know what she was saying when she did it, didn’t know how the words might come across to him. She was too young. She didn’t mean anything by it, of course.

She grunted loudly with frustration, bringing his attention back to her. She was gripping the latch handle with both hands, throwing as much of her weight against it as she could manage, cursing with each lunge.

“Open! Up! You! Fucker!”

She let go of the latch, stomped around in a small circle, waving her hands in frustration. There was no padlock, no visible lock. The small keyhole was hidden behind a small sliding plate beneath the armored keypad. She was stumped. She knew she was letting him down.

“FUCK!” she hissed through gritted teeth. “I’m sorry, Joel. I can’t open it.”

“Alright, Ellie. Don’t get excited. We’ll –“

She started kicking the latch with her good leg. “OPEN!!”

“Ellie! Calm down! Jesus, kid. We’ll figure –“

**Click Click… click click Click…**

She froze, her eyes wide. His breath caught in his throat. The sound was coming from her side of the fence.

“Climb!” he hissed. “Climb up! Fast as you can.”

She jumped up, her fingers pulling hard against the links, her wet shoes slipping and sliding against the metal links of the fence. He could hear her breathing hard and fast, almost whining in fear. She made it up a few feet, one difficult handhold at a time, but the strength in her arms was running out. She wasn’t built like him. She needed her legs to climb. She stalled just over halfway up the big fence. She hung there, muscles straining, knuckles turning white.

“Goddamnit, Ellie! Climb!”

“I’M TRYING!” Strained, guttural. There was a shrill edge of panic to her high voice.

Across the parking lot, a clicker emerged from the darkened interior of the visitor center. Another one followed close behind. A third stumbled out of the far end of the building, through the door marked ‘Gift Shop + Refreshments.’ Two of them had been men, wearing matching, dry rotting uniforms, park personnel of some kind, probably. The third was once a woman, now a pathetic, spasming thing in mold-encrusted street clothes.

If he could have reached through the fence to help her, he would have. But he could do nothing more than shout encouragements at her and clench his fists uselessly.

“Come on, kid! You can do it! Hurry! HURRY!”

She looked over her shoulder, saw them coming. She tried to stifle a shriek, swallowing that energy and channeling it into her arms instead. She grunted shrilly through gritted teeth and pulled herself up another few inches through nothing more than sheer force of will. This was not a girl who would just lay down and die, not with the fate of the world riding on her burning, protesting shoulders.

_Come… on… just… a… little… more…_

Her fingers could take no more and she fell to the pavement below with a squealing thud.

“ELLIE!”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The voice actress for Tess, Annie Wersching, is from Missouri. I thought it was a good fit for Tess too. She certainly doesn’t sound like she’s from Boston. St. Louis fits her better. In fact, now that I think about it, did anyone in the Boston QZ sound like they were from Boston? Hmmm.
> 
> In the flashback (which takes place in 2026), Joel and Tess talk about how helicopters are rarely seen in the sky anymore. In my story, by year 2033, even FEDRA can’t put helicopters in the air for anything less than a real emergency. The spare parts are all used up and aviation fuel reserves are virtually spent. You can’t fly turbine powered aircraft on regular gasoline or biofuels. I should note that this conflicts with an artifact you find in the game (The “Field Ops Log”) in which the officer in charge notes that his team arrived at the LZ, which is military slang for “Landing Zone”, the place where soldiers disembark from a helicopter. Since no helicopters are heard or seen in the game (that I recall anyway), I decided that a world without air travel was just that much smaller and more dangerous for people in the QZ. Your mileage may vary of course. Also, this flashback takes place the morning following the events of chapter seven in volume one.
> 
> Lastly, the Big Darby nature preserve is a real place. When I was laying out the journey for Joel and Ellie when I put this story together, I noticed the place on the map and knew I’d have to include it somehow. It’s a cool little nature preserve (little compared to something massive like Yellowstone), but I took a few artistic liberties with the description of the place.
> 
> And that brings us to the end of another chapter. Come back on Wednesday to see if Ellie gets eaten by the clickers and if the Flying To Wyoming series comes to a sudden, tragic end (or not) in Chapter Four: Bubbling Up.


	4. Bubbling Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie gets attacked by clickers. She doesn’t get eaten by them. (Spoiler alert!)

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 04 – Bubbling Up**

 

The clickers were on the move, jerking, twitching, a hundred feet away and closing fast. Ellie struggled to get to her feet. The wind had been knocked out of her when she fell from the tall fence. On the other side of the fence, Joel was thinking fast.

“Get up, kid!”

“Tryin’” she croaked, gasping, coughing, barely audible, rolling over, pulling her feet underneath her, struggling to make her legs cooperate. She had never been a quitter.

“GODDAMMIT ELLIE! I SAID GET UP!!”

His words struck her like physical blows. She would have whimpered if she’d had any air to make the sound. Tears of frustration formed at the corners of her eyes. She was trying. But trying wasn’t good enough for him, was it?

“ _GET!! UP!!_ ”

She did, wobbling and hacking, trying to get her lungs to work again, trying not to cry from the pain in her lungs and the ache in her heart. She was letting him down and she knew it. She fumbled, stumbled, clutched at the fence, pulling herself to her feet, holding herself up with sore fingers, trying to reach for him through the metal links.

Joel stepped away from her outstretched fingers, ignoring her silent but moving lips, her pleading eyes. He shoved the barrel of his revolver through the links, pulled the trigger. Three shots. Two missed. One struck the middle clicker in the shoulder. They were still too far away to hit with a pistol. He reached for the Winchester but suddenly thought better of it.

“j-jo-“ she tried to speak, but couldn’t. Her lungs were still burning, trying to remember how to breathe. Her fingers fumbled with the pistol tucked into the waistband of her jeans. Her eyes sought his, but he didn’t look at her. She was scared and needing to connect with him before the end, but he wouldn’t have it. She had let him down. She turned to face the oncoming clickers. She would go down fighting. She would make him proud.

He scooped up her shotgun, thumbed the release lever and two shells popped out and landed in the wet grass. She heard the distinctive ‘floomp’ of the ejecting ammunition and turned to look at him. He closed the action of weapon and jammed the gun into the gap between the links, as far as it would go, level to his waist. It wouldn’t fit, there was no way she could pull the rest of it through, but she began to try anyway. As she tugged uselessly at the double barrels, he unslung his shotgun, worked the pump, cycling the action open, spitting out a single red shell. He didn’t close the action, leaving the ejection port open, the gun unloaded. He jammed it through the fence too, higher up and to the right of her shotgun. She looked at it uncomprehendingly.

“Here! Climb!” he shouted, bracing the lower of the two guns to act as a step for her.

Her eyes widened, understanding what he was doing. She shoved her pistol in her pocket and tried to make her tired fingers work again.

“Good thinking,” she tried to say, but it mostly came out as nonsensical gasping squawks.

She stepped onto the barrels of her shotgun, her foot turned sideways at an angle so sharp that Joel could only marvel at her flexibility. Using it as a foothold, she pulled herself up quickly, her other foot seeking the barrel of his shotgun higher up the fence. Back and forth she went, one foot to the other, as he moved the guns up the fence, inserting them ever higher, pulling down on one with all his strength to keep her in place as he jammed the other one further up into the gaps of the fence. One ad hoc step at a time, she made her way higher and higher, as high as he could reach. She tossed her leg up, hooked an ankle over the top of the fence and pulled herself up just as the first clicker arrived. She squealed and hung on, straddling the large pole across the top, both hands gripping the metal bar for dear life, her body rocking side to side from the impacts as the onrushing clickers barreled into the fence.

To the clickers' weak echolocation, the fence must have been invisible. They slammed into it at a dead run, flailing at the wire keeping them from Joel with cracked talons, screeching in fury, unable to get to him, stymied by a barrier they didn’t know existed until they had collided with it. They ripped and tore at it to no avail. Even cordyceps couldn’t outmuscle steel.

Joel pulled his shotgun free and cycled the action, loading a fresh shell. He edged the tip of the barrel through the fence, level with the head of the tallest clicker. From above, a series of short, sharp pops rang out, brass rained from the sky, and the female clicker at the rear of the pack collapsed and lay still, five of Ellie’s bullets buried in what remained of her fungus-infested brain.

“fuck… these… guys…” he heard her wheeze.

“Yeah,” he said tersely and pulled the trigger.

 

* * *

 

“Man, that was amazing,” she said enthusiastically, her voice still a bit hoarse from earlier. “That stupid lock was all like ‘You’re not getting past me’ and you were all like ‘Fuck you, lock’ and then that slug hit it and it was all like ‘KA-BLAM! Oh no! I’m exploding! I should’ve let you through! Now I’m all fucked up and shit!’ and you were all like ‘Ha ha ha! Suck it, lock!’ BOOM!”

She laughed, her hands flying apart, fingers waggling, mimicking the way the lock had burst apart when the slug from his shotgun ripped through it, warping and buckling the ruptured mechanism, leaving a thousand little pieces of it all over the parking lot.

“That shit was awesome, Joel! Seriously!” she laughed, looking up at him like he was the most amazing person in the world to her, which of course he was. He couldn’t help but smile a little, being at the center of such admiration and devotion.

“Yeah. It was pretty cool, I guess,” shrugging his broad shoulders in a way that appealed to her adoring eyes.

_I love the way he walks, all swaggering and stuff. It’s so fucking sexy._

“Super fucking cool,” she corrected, lightly punching his arm as they walked. “How many of those slugs do you have left?”

“Just three,” he answered. The supply cache they had stumbled across in Johnstown five days ago had been a real treasure trove. Shotgun slugs were almost impossible to come across these days. Most of them had been used up years ago, one of the few reliable rounds that could be used effectively against military bulletproof vests and light vehicle armor. Joel tried to remember the last time he’d had any of the powerful rounds in his possession. It had been ages ago.

Baltimore? Or maybe Dover? Yeah, it was Dover. That’s right, Joel thought, his mind drifting back to days gone by, in defiance of all his rules to never think about the past. We were in Delaware. It was Baltimore where we lost Vic to that sniper while we were rolling down the road on our way out of that shit hole. The bullet tore Vic’s skull apart. I can still see it. That old blue Suzuki motorcycle tumbled and twisted, leaving sparks and meat all over the road. Tina was on the back of the bike when it went over, her arms snug around Vic. They were romantic, I think, but I was never sure. Vic was secretive about that sort of stuff. I know that Tommy never told me about what he and Vic got up to that one night in the fancy hotel in Oklahoma City. Hell, I was happy not to ask. Tommy was crazy. He’d try anything once, that was what he’d always said. I guess he meant those words a lot more than I thought he did. Poor Tina had just joined up with us a month before we got to the outskirts of Baltimore. She was young and cute, maybe sixteen or seventeen at the most. Pretty little thing. Vic liked her a lot. She got dragged across the blacktop, trapped under the bike as it laid over, still holding on to Vic’s dead body. Torn up and screaming the way she was, and with us pinned down behind our vehicles, all we could do was listen to Tina cry for help before she finally bled out. There was no helping her, not in the shape she was in. Not even Lisa could have saved her, not even with all her paramedic training and medical kits. Not that it mattered, much. Lisa was long dead by that morning in Baltimore. Tina never had a chance. We never found the sniper. We hid behind our trucks, ripped up the tree line with few hundred rounds, trying to flush him out. We scanned the forest with our scopes, fanned out in pairs to find him, searched for half an hour. No use. He was long gone. So was Tina.

Yeah, it was Dover where I ran out of shotgun slugs. Anthony was still with us. Seems like I remember using my last slug to shoot through the bulletproof glass of a flipped over, silver FEDRA SUV. Our last truck was wrecked, those sonsabitches had plowed into it, thinking they’d come out of the collision okay and we wouldn’t. Miguel was dying behind the wheel. Jerry was dead too, but he wasn’t in the truck when it was hit. He’d died that morning, when we’d opened the wrong door. He’d been dragged down by those crazies when they’d come boiling out that building like something out of a horror movie. Guess they’d been huddled in there for warmth. We hauled ass. That trick knee of his had finally gone out at the wrong time. Anthony gunned them all down. I think he hit Jerry a few times too, but it didn’t matter much by that point, he couldn’t have been saved. They’d already started in on him. Jerry was screaming and half-eaten. Just too far gone by the time Anthony and I got to him to try to drag him to safety. I still had Freddy’s big stainless steel shotgun. I’d lost that slick nickel-plated .45 of his, can’t remember where exactly, but I still had his shotgun. I put Jerry down with it. It’s all I could do for that nice old guy. Me and Anthony shot half our ammo just forcing those things to retreat long enough for us to get back the truck.

I remember the FEDRA men screaming as I poured the gasoline can into their overturned vehicle, standing on the door, the truck laying over on its side, my muddy boots marking up their nice clean FEDRA logo, dumping the fuel through the driver’s window I’d punched a hole in with the slug. Tommy was killing every one of the crazies who tried to get at me with his fancy M-16, the one Vic had rigged up for him with an underslung autoloading shotgun mounted where the grenade launcher should be. He’d been carrying it with him since the winter we’d spent in Pine Bluff. Tommy loved that damn gun. It was spewing fire and smoke from both barrels, running through his bullets and shotgun shells fast. I didn’t have much time, but I was mad as hell and those FEDRA bastards had it coming. The stream of gasoline hit them and they panicked. They started firing up at me. The bullets ricocheted off the glass, that shit was bulletproof, and bounced around inside the truck. A spark from one of those bullets did the work for me. Hell, I’m pretty sure I was out of matches by then anyway. Shit, I was pretty much out of a crew by that point too. Just me, Tommy, Big Matt, and Anthony. Just four left. We’d started out in Austin with more than a dozen people and at our peak, when we reached Memphis, we were more than twice that strong. Two big moving trucks, a long one and a short one, all crammed full of loot and stuff, Dr. Montalvo’s RV with the kitchen and toilet, a half-dozen pickup trucks, Matt’s Harley Softail, my Electra Glide with the Dallas Police Department paintjob, Tommy’s Dyna Super, Vic’s Suzuki Intruder. It was a goddamn ass-kicking convoy when we hit the road. Nobody would fuck with us. Man, we raised hell from San Antonio all the way to the Atlantic coast. Hell, we didn’t even lose anybody for the first year, until Hector and Don got ambushed in San Antonio. We were fucking bulletproof most of the time. But that morning in Dover, it was pretty much the end of the line for what was left of the crew, I guess. We were stragglers after that, no trucks left, all of us on foot, doing whatever it took to get to Boston. Only three of us made it inside the QZ just as that terrible winter hit.

Big Matt took a good look at the burning SUV all, smashed up and wrapped up with our wrecked pickup, Miguel all twisted up inside the crushed cab. Poor old bastard was unconscious, gurgling and dying. We stood around what was left of our last truck, now all busted up and leaking fluids. Miguel loved that rusty old Chevy. He’d driven it all the way from Austin, when we’d all set out on the road together, wanting to get away from FEDRA and the army and everyone who needed us to get in a nice, orderly line and wait to be shot and bulldozed out of the way, or just be good and hide in the rubble outside the gates and starve to death quietly, out of sight, just because we were a bunch of nobodies who were good enough to build those walls, but not good enough to get to live inside them. So we set out and made our own damn way in this fucked up world. And it was pretty damn good. For a while, anyways. But there we stood, nine years later, and whatever edge we’d had before, it was all gone now. We were stragglers again.

Nobody said a word. There were dead crazies all over the street, dozens and dozens of the things, but they weren’t coming out of the buildings anymore. We’d finally killed the whole damn mess of them. Must’ve taken half the day to do it after we’d accidentally stirred up a nest of the crazy fuckers. Who knew any of the poor bastards were still around? Fucking government made them, told them to eat the sugar cube with the little drop of medicine on it, promised them that it would protect them from the pandemic until the QZs could be expanded and there’d be room for them inside. Guess they didn’t test that medicine enough, because all it did was turn a bunch of them into a watered down kind of runner. It was an accident. Wasn’t time to test it properly, that’s what the man on the radio said, back when we were quit of Austin and living good down in La Grange, living on our own terms, back when there was still power in the electrical grid and something to watch on television and the big packs of the infected weren’t ripping up the south like a damned lawnmower yet.

Should’ve known Dover looked too good to be true. It was all one big trap, for us and the government men who were already there. The FEDRA crew and their radio tower team were dead. We had their food, what was left of it. But being surround and cut off by those crazies for so long had left those government assholes pretty much out of ammo, made them so desperate that they’d tried to ram their way through us, hoping to finally get away from Dover while we fought the crazies for them and gave them the distraction they needed to make a break for it. Their plan didn’t work out any better for them than ours had for us. Plenty of bad luck to go around in Dover that day, I reckon. Fuck, by the time we killed the handful of nearly unarmed soldiers still hiding in the radio tower, the four of us were probably the last people left alive in the whole godforsaken city.

Tommy was down to his pistol, Anthony had less than half a box of ammo for his machinegun. He still had Alexa’s fancy submachine pistol in his bag, but none of us knew it. She’d been dead so long by then that we’d all sort of forgotten he’d taken her gun before we left Memphis. Matt knew that he and I were both low on ammo too and now we were all on foot. Late November and four hundred miles from Boston, where Matt swore he knew somebody who could sneak us in. The big biker looked at me, spit out a wadded plug of that nasty tobacco he never seemed to run out of, and pulled the empty magazine from his old Uzi. He didn’t have a single bullet left for it. First time that had ever happened. He looked at me like I should know what to do. We need a plan, he said. What’re you thinkin’, Chief?

“What are you thinking about?” Ellie’s voice was gentle, kind, curious.

“What?” Joel asked, blinking, finding himself on a road in rural Ohio, walking towards the town of East Liberty. Dover was half a lifetime away suddenly. Big Matt and his disgusting chewing tobacco were gone. In his place was a short, cute, redheaded girl. She was looking at him with friendly green eyes, a smile on her lips, freckles on her round cheeks, her legs were moving quickly, trying to keep up with the faster pace he was moving at. She was so sweet. So pretty. He slowed his pace out of consideration for her. He hadn’t meant to walk that fast, wasn’t sure when he had started to quicken his stride so much. He didn’t want her getting tired. He was angry at himself for letting himself drift like that, his legs remembering the long, cold walk to Boston, the quick stride that four tall, grown men could move at. A pace much too fast for a short girl like her.

How the fuck does she do this to me? Every damn thing I sank down there years ago, so I wouldn’t have to ever think about any of it again, and now she’s got it all bubbling up like an oil well about to erupt.

“You gotta be thinking about _something_. Normally when you ignore my questions, you have a completely different look on your face,” she grinned. “I call it your ‘lordy, why won’t this girl be quiet’ look. But this was a whole new look for you. It was more of a ‘Joel is somewhere else right now, please check back later’ sort of look. Never seen that one before.”

“You said you asked me somethin’?” he said, trying to deflect her question. He didn’t want to talk about Delaware. The end of the crew had been another bad turning point in his life. Without the crew, he had been back to square one, with no purpose beyond basic survival, especially once they made it to Boston and Tommy joined the Fireflies and didn’t want his big brother telling him what to do anymore. After that, Joel had been angry and adrift, not knowing what do with himself, spending too much time with a bottle of booze in one hand and a revolver with just one bullet in it in the other. Those were bleak times, times best forgotten, times he had only barely made it through without clocking himself out of this shitty world. Nothing but bad times until Tess had hired him on to work for her a few years later. Things got a little better after that.

“Yeah. Sort of,” she said, not minding at all that he clearly didn’t want to share his thoughts. She was used to that by now. “I said that sign over there seems wrong to me.”

She was pointing at a large white sign on the side of the road, mounted directly beneath the one that read ‘Big Darby Headwaters Nature Preserve, County Road 152, Exit Right’.

             PLEASE NOTE THE PRESERVE WILL BE CLOSED  
          FOR WHITE-TAILED DEER HUNTING 11/26 – 12/2

“That seems _wrong_ somehow,” she said.

He looked at her, glanced back at the sign. “What? Hunting deer?”

“Yeah. They should have some place they can be safe from being eaten and just run free and play reindeer games and make baby deers and stuff. It’s wrong to let heartless deer whackers like you in here to hunt them. It’s mean, dude. Wrong, you know?”

“You know what’s even meaner than that?”

“What?”

“All those cute, furry little baby deer starving to death come wintertime because the herd got too big and they ate up all their food.”

She sighed deeply, knowing he was probably right, but sad that he had wrecked the magical world of frolicking deer that had formed in her head. “Thanks for ruining the moment for me, Captain Killjoy.”

“Come on, kiddo. This way.” He pointed to a sign further down the road. It told them that Middleburg was behind them and East Liberty was to their left, about two miles away or so.

Ellie read the sign aloud as they walked past it. “US Highway 33. East Liberty, Ohio. 2 Miles.”

She pondered that for a bit.

“Is there a West Liberty?” she asked.

He answered. “According to the map, yeah. South of here.”

“South? West Liberty is _south_ of East Liberty? Did people have maps back when they were naming towns? Did nobody have a compass? Or were they just making shit up as they went along?”

“What do you think, squirt?”

She giggled. “I know what I’d do.”

“Yep. And that’s the same thing they did. Make shit up as you go.”

She laughed in delight. This day had started out great and was only getting better.

_He’s changed. He’s never been this friendly or casual with me. Yeah, we’ve had a few moments here and there, but nothing like this. We’re actually talking!_

_Was it because of the battle at Fort Overpass the day before yesterday? Did I finally prove to him that I’m not useless?_

_Holy fucking shit! What if I’ve finally managed to warm him up a little? Pry his cold, crusty, Joel-y heart open just bit. Maybe we can really connect now. Maybe he’ll be my friend finally. How cool would that be?_

_Give me a chance, Joel. If you’d just get to know me, you’d really like me. I promise._

He was letting her carry the scoped rifle. She’d wanted to. It was almost a big as she was, but he didn’t hear a peep out of her about it. She insisted that she carry her weight on this trip. She wasn’t here for sightseeing. She wasn’t a tourist. She was a sidekick.

When it comes to important stuff, he thought, she’s not a complainer. Not this kid. She ain’t very big, but she’s damn tough. Maybe I oughta tell her that one of these days.

“I want you to know that I forgive you for not defending my honor the other day.”

“What’re you talkin’ about, kiddo?”

“Those hillbilly assholes called me a slut, Joel. A _slut!_ To my face! While they were shooting at me, by the way,” she needled him affectionately, lightly punching his arm. “You could’ve at least told them I’m not that kind of girl and given them the finger or something.”

“Ellie, I stove in a man’s head with a damn muffler. There was a guy whose arm was on fire and I almost decapitated him with the lid from an exploded oil drum. I threw one poor sonuvabitch headfirst off the overpass for you. I think I defended your honor just fine, you little brat.”

She replied soothingly, laying it on thick to annoy him just a bit. “Oh _okay_. I forgive you for not flipping the bird at them.”

“Good. That’s more like it.”

“Thank you for the decapitation,” she added sweetly. “It’s the little touches like that that make a lady feel special.”

 

* * *

 

The creek was wide. The bridge spanning it was out. From the looks of it, it had been demolished intentionally. Large chunks of it were down in the muddy water, sticking out of the dirty water at crazy angles, overgrown with moss and several clusters of vegetation, a green and white blanket slowly overtaking the decaying edges of the rusting steel and crumbling concrete.

“Did somebody blow up that bridge?” she asked, standing just at the edge of the water but not daring to set foot in the flowing brown stream. This wasn’t like the creek waters in Big Darby. Those waters were clean and clear. This looked like crap.

“Maybe. A long time ago, from the looks of it.”

Ellie shielded her eyes from the afternoon sun with one hand, looking up at the grassy bank and the jagged, corroded edge where the road had once met the bridge. She remembered the bombed out ruins around Boston, remembered how Tess had told her how the military had blasted the fuck out of everything around the QZ to kill the infected hiding in the buildings.

_Probably killed the poor people hiding in those buildings too, but you had to kill the few to save the many or whatever bullshit you had to say to justify killing a bunch of scared people._

_God, seems like a lifetime ago._

_I miss Tess. She was nice, in a scary way. And cool too. And pretty._

_If I’m feeling this way, I can’t imagine how much Joel must miss her._

“The army?” she asked, pointing to the destroyed bridge, swiveling her head to look at her companion who was ankle deep in the nasty water, and judging the distance and the depth to the far side.

“Maybe. Who knows. We gotta get across this creek, I know that.”

“How?” she asked, looking around. “I don’t see a pallet or a boat or anything.”

“I’ll wade across first to check it out. I don’t think it’s too deep.”

“Isn’t there some other way? That water looks… gross. And poopy.”

“Yeah it does. But it’s just mud. It won’t kill us.”

“Seriously? It looks like shit water to me, buddy. I had latrine cleaning duty more than once. Trust me. I know what poo juice looks like.” She gingerly nudged a baseball-sized rock into the creek with her foot. It dropped in with a plop and disappeared into the brown haze only a few inches beneath the surface. “Jeez, Joel. I can’t see _anything_ in that nasty crap.”

“Me neither. But this is the only way into town that doesn’t start with us jumpin’ the bike over that busted bridge up there.”

“Oh man! That would be so cool!”

“Not gonna happen. It’s this way or no way, kiddo.”

“Couldn’t you chop down a tree? Hollow out a canoe? I can help. Find me a plank. I’ll start whittling a paddle while you chop.” She tried to make a joke of her fear, like always.

“Stay here, squirt. I’ll be back in a minute.” He took off his backpack and left it beside her for safekeeping.

“Joel…”

Her voice was off somehow. It was… worried, maybe? It brought him to a stop, just as he was almost knee deep in the water. He twisted around to look at her. She was standing at the edge of the water, her toes pointed inward, her knees squeezed tight, her hands wrung together at her waist. The very picture of nervousness.

She hated to be left alone, especially in the woods, which still felt foreign and strange to her. Even worse, if something happened to him in the water, she wouldn’t be able to help him. She hated feeling helpless too.

”What is it, Ellie?”

“Umm… Be careful… okay?”

“Don’t you worry about me, kiddo. I got this.”

_Yeah, sure. You say that now. But when the evil mud people come out of hiding, you’ll be sorry._

He waded out, trying to find a way across the creek that isn’t too deep. In the middle, it rose up to his neck, almost to his jaw. The mud sucked at his boots. He kept his head tilted back, breathing steadily, trying not to get the muddy water in his mouth. It wasn’t as bad as the scummy green sludge in Pittsburgh, but only by a matter of degrees. Already he couldn’t wait to wash these clothes again.

“How’s it looking, Joel?” she called from her watchful spot on the creek’s edge.

“So far, so good,” he replied. More than halfway across now. Another minute or so passed and he finally trudged his way up out of the brown mess. He stood dripping and triumphant on the far side.

“Woo! Go Joel!” Ellie cheered, her arms up high, fists clenched in triumph.

_Man, his butt looks pretty nice in a wet pair of jeans._

He shook his head in amusement, still not used to having his own personal cheerleader. He looked around, trying to find the best way up the high bank, looking for any sign that anyone other than him had passed this way lately. He walked the length of the bank looking for tracks or traces. He didn’t notice her shifting about on the other side, pacing around, her eyes always coming back to him, her hands shoved into her pockets so she wouldn’t wring her fingers.

“Joel,” her voice was friendly but just a little forlorn. “You _are_ coming back to get me right? We’re a team. Don’t forget.”

“I’ll be over there in a minute, kid. Don’t fret none.”

All she needed was to hear the sound of his voice and the anxiety she was working so hard to hide evaporated in the warm sunlight.

”I’m not worried, dummy. I’m just giving you fair warning. If you don’t come back soon, I’m taking the motorcycle and leaving you here. I’m going to Vegas and I’m gonna put it all on red.” She giggled and the sound of it mixed it beautifully with the tinkling notes of the flowing creek.

**. . .**

“Your pack zipped up good and tight?” He was near the bank, slightly more than ankle deep, shrugging his taped-shut pack onto his shoulders, adjusting the slings of his rifle and shotgun to hang low and horizontally, just above the small of his back, safely out her way.

“Yep. Double-checked it. Ready to get wet, boss.” She was ready to get in the water if she had to, but she still had no idea what his plan to get her across was. She was curious in the same way a cow going into a slaughterhouse wonders what’s on the other side of that bloody door.

“Good. Mine too. Come on. Follow me, kid.” He turned and began to cross, careful to hide his smile from her.

“What?! That shit’s way too deep for me, Joel!” Her high voice was almost shrill. “It was almost too deep for you! Stop messing with me! Get back here, dude! Help me out!”

“Man up, wouldya? You can make it. It’s probably no more than a foot or so over your head. Breathin’s not that important to you, right? I mean, you talk so much, I’ve seen you go for hours without drawin’ a breath.”

“Har har. That was so funny I forgot to laugh.” Her arms were crossed. She frowned and looked away, making it clear that she wasn’t budging from her spot on the shore. It was obvious from her tone that he was finding this much more amusing than she did. She looked back with worry. “Seriously, dude. Tell me what to do, okay? What’s the plan?”

“Just run really fast when you hit the middle part. Try not to get stuck down there. You’ll do fine. Probably. The mud’s only waist deep down here. Don’t let it suck you down.”

She snorted derisively, her chin tipped up, as haughty as she could make herself appear. “That’s fine for you, squishing through the mud and shit like a gross boy, but I have dainty lady feet. That means that I have to keep them away from muddy water, sticks, frogs, snakes, land mines, sharks… and whatever the fuck else is hiding in that muck.”

“Come on out to me, Ellie.”

“Not getting in that water, Joel. Not without a boat. Or possibly a raft, depending on how well you lash it together.”

“‘Lash it together…’” he repeated. “You know a lot about rafts, do you, city girl?”

“‘Huckleberry Finn,’ Joel. It’s a classic. Practically a ‘how-to’ manual to being a troublemaking, runaway kid. Plus, the instructors didn’t want us reading it, so of course I had to find a copy.”

_I read the comic book version. That still counts, right?_

“Get out here, you little bookworm. Climb up on my shoulders. I’m gonna carry you across.”

“Are… are you serious?” The offer was so tempting to her that she almost stepped into the hated, disgusting water. Almost.

_A piggyback ride. A sexy, muddy piggyback ride. Cool._

“Do you see any other way?” He came back, stopping a few steps closer to the shore, half his legs beneath the murky surface. He opened his arms, gestured to encompass the entire creek. “The bridge is out and I don’t have a pair of water wings handy. We do it this way or I leave you on that side while I go into town.”

“Water wings? What’re those?” she asked, not realizing that she’d sort of made a pun until it was much too late to point it out and pat herself on the back.

“Never mind. Get out here and climb on,” he patted his shoulders. “C’mon, Red. We ain’t got all day.”

She groaned as though she was reluctant to do it, but she very eagerly waded out to him until the water was up to her knees. He knelt down, helping her climb up and take a seat across his shoulders. He gripped her legs, just above the bend of the knee, stood up, lifting her weight easily, and began to carry her across the creek.

“You know… this isn’t too bad,” she said after a moment spent on his shoulders.

“Beats a pallet, yeah?”

“Yep. In fact, it’s kinda nice. From now on, I insist on crossing all bodies of water like this. Even shallow ones. Rain puddles too.”

He snorted. “You wish. Maybe we’ll find a life vest in town and next time I can just tow you behind me. Y’know, sorta drag you along like a piece of driftwood.”

“Whatever you gotta tell yourself, dude. But I’m the one riding in style up here. It’s clear to me which one of us is the more important one in this partnership.”

He chuckled while she looked around happily, grinning from ear to ear, almost as though she were riding high on the back of the Honda. Her hands rested lightly on the top of his head, her feet kicked happily in the murky brown water around his waist. They were getting deeper and deeper as they went. The water was soon up to his neck. It began to seep through her jeans, soaking her bottom. It was not a pleasant sensation.

“Ugh. Gross. My butt’s wet.”

“Mine too. Stop squirming, Ellie.”

“Pfft. You’re not the boss of me.” Nevertheless, she sat perfectly still. She began to whistle instead.

He tried to place the tune, but he couldn’t. It was familiar, but he couldn’t remember where he’d heard it before. He thought about asking her, but who knew what sort of can of worms that might open. A conversation about music might be the sort of thing that could go on and on all day with this kid.

“Oh, man,” she blurted out, a thought coming to her out of the blue, as they so often did. “You don’t think there are gators swimming around under there… do you?”

“I sure as hell hope not.”

She patted the top of his head affectionately. “If you bump into any alligators or giant squids, I expect you to throw yourself at them heroically while I get away. Okay, Joel?”

“Actually, my plan is to jam you inside their mouth like a giant toothpick while _I_ get away. I’m the only one of us who can swim, y’know.”

She exhaled disappointedly. “That’s not very chilvailrous, you butthead.”

“Chivalrous,” he corrected. “And you gotta be a lady to expect that sort of treatment. And ladies don’t go around spittin’ out the F-word the way you do.”

“Pfft. Whatever. Shut the fuck up and fucking carry me the fuck across,” she giggled.

The water had been up to his neck a minute before, but now it was only as high as his chest. They were more than halfway across. Her butt was completely soaked now, dripping yucky creek water down his back as he walked. It was very icky and she considered herself to be the greatest sidekick ever by not complaining about it very much.

“C’mon! Be a good horse, Joel. Yah! Giddyup! _Wuh-Pssh!_ ” She made whip cracking sounds.

“You’re gonna get dunked in a minute, you little brat.”

“Too late! We’re almost across.” She cracked the invisible whip in her hand over her head with great enthusiasm, gleefully providing the sound effects with her smiling mouth. ” _Wuh-Pssshh!_ Yah! Giddyup, Joel! C’mon, boy! _Wuhpshhhh!_ Faster! Yah! Hurry up or I’m selling you to the glue factory.”

Joel began to turn around, to walk back the way they came.

“No! Stop! Whoa! Whoa, boy! Bad horsie!” She pulled at his hair. “Don’t make me dig my spurs into you!”

He felt her heels tapping firmly against his ribs as he reached the middle of the creek.

“You’re going’ swimmin’ today, Ellie. You better get ready.”

“In this nasty brown poop water? As if! C’mon, Joel. I’m sorry. I was kidding,” she said, her words gushing out in a roaring torrent, desperate to keep as much of herself as dry as possible. She squirmed and wriggled on his shoulders. “You know how I am. I can’t help it! Honest! Years of being a neglected orphan have left me all messed up in the noggin. And I’ve got a mild case of the cordyceps. And you _know_ what that does to people. So please don’t dunk me in this gross water, Joel. _Please_.”

_I’m wearing a white top and no bra. I don’t think I’m ready to be in a wet t-shirt contest just yet._

He halted, made her wait in silence for a long moment, while he pretended to consider what he was going to do with her. She squirmed on his shoulders. Her fingers clenched his hair. Her thighs were tight against his ears. The warmth emanating from between her legs was a guilty but wonderful sensation to the back of his neck. She squeezed his head with her legs and squealed in a way that made him wish she were just a little older.

Lord, he thought, why did you put this amazing girl in my life? To test me?

“Joel? Can we go back to shore? Please? C’mon. Don’t dump me in this nasty creek. I’ll settle down. I promise. Okay?” she asked, her voice playful but just a little scared, and in just the right way. She squeezed him with her thighs again. “Please?”

“You wanna go swimmin’? Or are you gonna be good for me today, girl?”

“Pshh! When am I _not_ , man? I’m always good. I’m the heart and soul of this team, and you know it. You _need me_ to make you laugh and remind you not to be so fucking mean all the time. You’d be lost without me and my jokes, buster. Do I need to break out my pun book and show you? I’ll do it, wise guy. Just try me. _I dare you_.”

“That’s it. You’re goin’ in.” He made a big show of taking a deep breath. He closed his mouth and began to lean forward, just a little.

_Oh shit!_

”NO! NOOOoo!!!” she squalled, leaning back, hanging on to him for dear life, her small hands clutching at the top of his head, her strong thighs like a vise around his jaw. “I’ll be good, Joel! I’ll be so good you won’t even recognize me. You’ll wonder what happened to the bad Ellie you used to know and you’ll be shocked to learn that she was really my evil twin this whole time! It was her pun book anyway, not mine. I never liked puns! Nobody like puns! Only bad girls, like her! Good Ellie prefers knock-knock jokes. You’ll see! Just turn this boat around and take me to dry land, skipper!”

He laughed, straightened, turned, began to trudge back to shore. She exhaled with great relief. She patted the top of his head gently, began to rub her fingers through his hair, making tiny circles. He wondered why she was in such a good mood today. If he had asked, she would have told him about seeing the rabbit and the bird back at camp, about how much she loved being in the woods after a lifetime of being walled in by crumbling concrete and rusting steel. She’d tell him about the thrill she was feeling, the rush of being alive after the close call at the fence. But the truth was she loved talking to him, loved how he had scared her so lightheartedly just now, loved being in such intimate physical contact with him. His head felt so nice between her legs. She twirled her fingers in his hair, pretended he was facing the other direction down there. She wanted his mouth on her, wanted to feel his lips, his tongue on her body… down there… in that place.

She rolled her eyes at her own sudden shyness, her hesitation to confront that desire.

_My pussy. I want his mouth on my pussy. There, was that so hard, Ellie?_

She tousled his hair cheerfully. She wanted to put her mouth on him too.

She half-closed her eyes, feeling foolish about the places her mind was going. She wasn’t dumb. She knew that was never going to happen, not between her and him, and so she decided to make him laugh instead. He probably needed a laugh. She needed to laugh too.

“Knock Knock, Joel.”

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” he said with only partially faked exasperation. “Really, Ellie?”

“C’mon! Knock knock, you grumpy old fart.” She gently rapped her knuckles on the top of his head, making a knocking sound with her clucking tongue.

He sighed, trudging through the mud, closer to shore now. “Who's there?”

”Little old lady!”

”Little old lady who?”

”I didn't know you could yodel.”

He chuckled. She laughed. He wanted to reach back and smack her ass affectionately for being such a pain in the butt, for being such a stalwart friend, for being someone he could rely on, for always seeing the best in him, for just being Ellie. But he thought better of it and kept both his hands on the tops of her knees. It was safer, for her and for him.

“Gonna slap your butt in a minute if you don’t knock this shit off, kiddo.”

She giggled, a hot ripple flowing through her. She squeezed his head with her thighs just a little more tightly, pulled very lightly at his hair with her slender fingers. She inhaled slowly, enjoying the sensation washing across her.

_Damn, Joel. Don’t even joke, dude. You have no idea what that does to me. I’m one messed up chick, buddy. I wish I could tell you. But I know you’ll think I’m a weirdo._

He couldn’t have guessed how much she secretly wanted him to do it. Ellie was nurturing a smoldering need to be spanked. She’d had the fantasy since her dormitory days with Riley and lately she was very much wanting Joel to take his big, strong hand to her tender bottom. She had always hated discipline and rules, but somewhere inside her was a growing desire to be turned over his knee and made to account for her short lifetime of terrible behavior. She was afraid to even admit it to herself, certain that it marked her as a weirdo for wanting such a thing, but she couldn’t help it. The heart wants what it wants, or so she’d heard. The butt wants what it wants too. Hers wanted it more and more with each passing week. Neither of them knew it, but her unspoken wish to be draped across his lap and punished sweetly and strictly would come true soon enough.

She breathed a sigh of relief as he knelt down at the edge of the water, letting her climb off. She took her time, her thighs already missing the feel of his big, broad shoulders.

“Next time, I’m droppin’ you in the creek, squirt. Count on it.” His eyes crinkled at the edge, taking joy in teasing her about her fear of water.

Eyes twinkling, she tried to play at being mad. “You are such a dick to me, Joel. Ugh! One of these days, I’m totally getting you back for all this stuff. I’m keeping a list of your transgressions, you know.”

“‘Transgressions’,” he repeated, with a soft shake of his head, following her up onto the dry bank. Water poured from him in the form of a dozen small waterfalls. His clothes clung to him in ways that were hard to ignore for a girl to ignore. “I swear, Ellie. You are a mess.”

“Books, Joel. I read them. Bunches of them,” she tapped the side of her head with her index finger. “That’s why _I’m_ the brains of this outfit too!”

He reached for her, miming an invisible beating stick cocked and ready in his other hand. She squealed and darted away nimbly, scrambling up the high, steep bank of the creek, hoping he would chase her.

He wanted to, that was for sure, but he was afraid of what he might do if he let himself catch her, never thinking for a moment that she wanted to be caught.

Catch you, pull you down in the grass… kiss you, he thought. Jesus Christ, kid, if you had any idea of the terrible, shameful thoughts I’m thinking about you.

She stood at the top of the grassy bank and watched him slog his way up, soaked and dripping wet, his brown t-shirt plastered to his muscular chest and stomach in a way that made her think all sorts of thoughts that she knew she shouldn’t.

_Hot damn! Look at him, boo!_

_I am, Bad Ellie. I am. And I thought you left, by the way._

_(Snort) Like you’re ever gonna get rid of me! Don’t be dumb! Good Ellie is just an urban legend, didn’t you know that? She never existed. And, holy fuck, this old guy is so damn hot. Fucking hot, Ellie! I wish he’d take that shirt off._

“Are you coming up here sometime today, Joel? Or are you gonna make a base camp and try for the summit tomorrow?” She snickered, looking down at him challengingly, her legs apart, her jeans wet and glued to her thighs. Her small hands were on the curves of her hips. He could tell by the twin points at the front of her shirt that she wasn’t wearing a bra. “Should I go for help? Or should I come down there and try to push you up the hill?”

“Kiss my ass, Ellie.”

She cackled and turned around, showing him her soaked, denim-wrapped backside. She was ‘feeling her oats’ as she’d heard him say, she couldn’t stop herself. She slapped her butt once, wetly, mocking him.

“You can kiss mine, Old Timer. I got up here first. Ellie is the mountain climber of this team too!” She raised her arms in victory as she wiggled her butt at him. “Boosh!”

She looked over her shoulder in sweet defiance, arms akimbo, smirking as he neared the top of the hill, her back to him for a few more moments, showing him her ass for as long as she could, until her nerve broke and she turned around to face him again. She felt so fucking glad to be alive today. She was brimming with joy. It made her bolder than usual. She wanted to dance under the sky, in the tall grass, with him. She laughed and it was a wonderful sound that echoed along the shore, playing over the surface of the flowing water, bounced off the mossy chunks of shattered bridge, making the ruins and the muddy creek somehow beautiful with her irrepressible magic.

_Hope you enjoyed the show, dude. Maybe if I’m bratty enough… you’ll have to do something about it later. That could be fun, right? It’s not like it’s sex or anything. Just a spanking, that’s all. And we both know I deserve it._

_Yes, you do, Not-So-Good Ellie. Yes, you do._

Oh lord, kid. What a nice ass you’ve got… God almighty, I gotta get rid of you and damn soon. If I have to, I’ll get down on my knees and beg Tommy to take you the rest of the way to the Fireflies so I can get the hell outta your life before it’s too late. You just ain’t safe with me no more, Red. Not with legs like that. Not with a perfect little hind end like the one you got.

She was waiting for him when he finally crested the top of the hill. She nodded, impressed that an old man had made it all the way to the top without dropping dead.

“Welcome to the top of Mount Williams, stranger. I’m Ellie Williams, the first person to scale this magnificent peak. May I show you to the gift store, Mister…?” She let the words hang in the air, hoping he’d take the bait.

“Miller.”

“Wh-what?” She was shocked. She hadn’t expected it to actually work.

“Joel Miller.” He smiled lopsidedly, cocky, his arms crossed smugly. He’d let her win this one and he’d still managed to completely blindside her. That made it a win for him, as far as he was concerned.

She inhaled in delight, burst into a wild grin, tried to ratchet it down to something less uncontrolled, less embarrassing, but couldn’t. Smiling crazily, she extended her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Miller.”

He snorted in amusement at the formality of her body language. He shook her little hand.

“Nice to meet you, Miss Williams.”

She beamed and returned the handshake enthusiastically. Her hand was swallowed up by his and she loved how it felt.

_Fuck, he’s so damn big._

Joel smirked, still feeling smug about catching this little chatterbox off guard. It wasn’t every day he left her searching for words. He had to rub it in, he couldn’t help himself

“It is ‘miss’, right?”

She exploded with unexpected laughter, becoming incredibly adorable, even for her. It brought a smile to his face to see her so happy. Her eyes were pinched shut, her cheeks round and creased with joy. Her small breasts jiggled against the fabric of her white shirt as her body shook. He felt his sleeping cock move inside his soaked jeans, just a little bit.

She opened her beautiful eyes, green and shining and sly. She punched his arm affectionately. “You better believe it is. This girl is _single_ , buddy. I like to play the field, you know? Can’t let the first big, strong man to come along just… tie me… down…”

Her voice faded to a whisper as she came to the end of the sentence, as she realized the inadvertent erotic implications of words she had chosen with complete and total innocence, never meaning to have them come out of her mouth sounding all dirty and suggestive and oh-so-very very true. She blushed, all the way to the tips of her ears, and turned around suddenly. She set off for the town with fast, resolute strides.

“Come on, Old Man Miller. We have to get to town and then hustle back to camp before it gets dark!”

He watched her go, her shapely ass and thighs still wet and encased tightly by dark denim, her attractive confidence and brashness from earlier suddenly gone, replaced with a shy, demure girlishness that he found incredibly appealing as well. For the first time, and for just the briefest moment, he let himself consider the real possibility that she might be feeling something for him too. He swallowed hard and brushed it off. He could not allow himself to pretend that was true. He couldn’t. It wasn’t true. _It wasn’t_. And he knew if he let himself think it, even for a minute, he might try to convince himself that what he was feeling for his teenage companion was normal, or healthy, or… shared.

That girl doesn’t want me. She can’t. She doesn’t. She _doesn’t_.

Up ahead, she looked back over her shoulder at him, her ponytail bouncing, her moist hips swinging, her eyes shy behind long red lashes, her feet squishing softly in soaked shoes. She was still blushing, less than before, but there was an unmistakable pinkness to her lovely cheeks.

“You coming, Joel?”

God, kid. I can’t keep you around much longer or I’ll never be able to give you up.

He set out after her, hustling to catch up with long, soggy strides, needing to take the lead. It wasn’t safe to walk behind her, not until those jeans of hers were dry. His pants were sopping wet too, virtually nothing more than a shiny layer of denim painted on his backside, and Ellie was more than happy to follow him all the way to town, her eyes on his tightly wrapped, shiny ass the whole way.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ellie reveals a love of knock knock jokes. I suspect she probably loved that simpler style of joke as a little girl and grew into an appreciation of the more clever wordplay of puns as she grew older. I suspect that when she’s old enough, she’ll surely delight in the genius of the highest form of humor: the priceless “yo momma” joke. ;-)
> 
> Ellie proves her bona fides as a reader by admitting that she enjoyed “Huckleberry Finn.” Sure, it was the comic book adaptation, but a classic is a classic. In my version of this world, Ellie’s reading collection is an eclectic mix of comic books, old magazines, and any “real books” she can get her hands on. Anything too daring or controversial (like Playboy or The Anarchist’s Cookbook) would likely have been taken away from her as contraband, so she had to make do. I think the idea of Ellie as an avid book person was a very cool character trait for Naughty Dog to give her, especially as a teenager growing up in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic world where there’s little time or inclination for intellectual pursuits. A deeply curious girl given to flights of fancy, Ellie would be an odd duck by today’s standards. As a kid growing up in the world she lives in, she must seem positively weird at times to other kids her age. She’s lucky Riley took a liking to her.
> 
> In other plot developments, Ellie gets a piggyback ride and remains adorable while doing so. Her somewhat innocent / somewhat kinky love for Joel is growing with each day she spends with him. Poor Joel’s willpower is slowly crumbling to her charms. How much longer before this simmering shared attraction boils over into a tidal wave of unbridled smooching? Gosh!
> 
> Check back in a few days for Chapter Five: American Muscle.


	5. American Muscle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie learns all about classic American cars and Joel talks a little about his high school days.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
 **Chapter 05 – American Muscle**

 

The roll-up door wasn’t particularly heavy, but it wasn’t exactly light either. Joel shifted his grip a bit, keeping his back straight, and trying to make his legs do most of the work.

“Joel…” Ellie’s voice wafted out from beneath the partially open door, a slight echo to the sound. “Man, you gotta see this. It’s so fucking cool.”

“Still waitin’ on you out here, kid,” he gruffed.

“Oh! Right! Sorry!” Her quick footsteps sounded from inside as she scampered across the room.

The sound of squeaking wheels reached his ears well before the squat, red, rolling toolbox slid under the edge of the door. Joel eased down his burden to rest atop the metal case.

“Whew!” he said, relieved to be finished with the door. He flexed his fingers to ease the tension in his knuckles.

Her head popped out from under the door, grinning widely.

“C’mon, Joel! You gotta check this out!” She scooted around in a tight circle on all fours and disappeared as quickly as she’d come. Her voice echoed from inside the garage of the auto repair shop. “Seriously, dude! You gotta come see!”

Joel looked briefly to the sky for some sort of assistance or guidance in dealing with his rambunctious sidekick – she was really firing on all cylinders today. But finding none, he sighed, took a deep breath, dropped to his hands and knees, and followed her inside.  
  


**. . .**  
  


Joel whistled. Ellie looked on, pleased with herself. She was right. He did like it. In the middle of the garage sat a low in the front, jacked up in the back, canary yellow car with dark green seats, twin black stripes along the hood and across the top and trunk, and cool chrome wheels, shiny and scooped in sort of like deep mixing bowls.

“Man!” exclaimed Joel with more than a tinge of awe in his voice, “Would you look at that!”

She was excited because he was excited. That sort of thing can be contagious sometimes.

“What is it, Joel?”

“It’s a ’69 Chevrolet Camaro.”

“’69? As in 1969?”

“Yep.” He walked around the old car, admiring it.

“Wow. That car’s really, _really_ old, huh? Is that nostalgia you’re breathing in, Joel?”

“Kiddo,” he said, placing his hand lightly, almost reverently, on the big air intake scoop jutting up from center of the car’s hood, “this right here is a prime example of a classic American muscle car.”

One car was pretty much the same as another to her, but she liked the term he used.

_Muscle car. That just sounds sexy. Cool. Who knew car stuff could be sorta sexy?_

She looked away for a moment, summoning up the nerve to say the words forming in her head.

_Do it, Ellie. Don’t be a wuss._

“Muscle car? Because big, muscle-y guys like you drove them?” She darted her eyes to him to see if he liked the compliment she’d snuck into the sentence, but his smiling face was still drinking in the sight of the car.

_Shit cakes! I’m over here, dude. Teenage girl crushing on you, just ten feet away. On your left. Crushing hard. Don’t make me send up a signal flare to get your attention, okay?_

“Not quite, kiddo. But yeah, it was mostly men that drove them. They were called muscle cars because they had big engines and a lot of horsepower.”

“So this goes pretty fast?” she asked, coming around to stand near him, wanting to bask in this moment with him. She had never seen him as excited about something in the way he was now and she wanted to savor every minute of it.

_Man, I wish he’d look at me like that. Sheesh. What do I have to do? Take off my shirt?_

“Hell yeah it does. This thing would’ve blown the doors off most cars on the road back when it was new.”

_I’ve gotta have better curves than a car, right? Or are men weird about stuff like this?_

“You ever have one?” She placed her hands on the hood near his, rubbing the yellow metal as admiringly as she could, trying hard to appreciate the car as much as he did, seeking to fully share this experience with him. It wasn’t easy.

_It is kind of a cool car, I guess._

“No, but I helped my buddy Eddie Hendricks restore his. He had a ’67 Camaro, but it was pretty close to this model.”

“Restore?” she asked. Like most adults, he sometimes would use words she knew, but use them in weird ways that made it hard to understand him.

For some reason, that question must have triggered a good memory or something, because Joel suddenly turned his head to make eye contact with her. His eyes were warm and friendly. They almost sparkled. He grinned at her in a way she had never seen before. The years fell off him, the worry on his face evaporated like dew in the rays of the morning sun. He seemed almost boyish, roguish, devilish. Ellie felt herself melt just a little.

_Fuck. That smile… Damn, he’s just so… sexy._

“Fancy way of saying that Eddie’s dad found it rusting in a junkyard and we spent a couple of years fixing it up till it ran like new again.” He grinned at her, tousled her ponytail affectionately, his mind clearly on better times. “Hell of a lot of work. Man! It was it worth it though!”

“Neat.” She beamed her best smile at him. “Do you think he still has it?”

He exhaled slowly, his face still smiling, albeit faintly now. He shrugged and his eyebrows went up in a melancholy way that seemed to say ‘what can you do?’ The years settled down on him again, returning like unwelcome crows to their nests.

“The summer after he graduated high school, Eddie took a curve going way too fast and rolled his ‘67 Camaro about a half dozen times before slamming into a telephone pole. They had to cut his body out with a power saw. You coulda fit what was left of him in a lunch box.”

She had a quick flash of the bus slamming into their truck in Pittsburgh, the bone-jarring impact, the awful dizziness as they spun around, lost control…

_I still have nightmares about that day._

Ellie grimaced, her face a mixture of revulsion and pity. Car wrecks weren’t a way that people died in her world. It was unknown and unexpected to her. A shark might as well have eaten Joel’s friend while he was soaking in his bathtub. It would have been just as unexpected. “Yeesh. Eddie should’ve got a car with less muscles.”

“Yeah.” He sounded a little sad. She could understand why. Losing a friend was hard. She knew all about that.

_Probably shouldn’t have made that joke._

“Sorry… I shouldn’t have… joked like that.”

“Don’t sweat it, Ellie. It’s okay. That stuff happened a long, long time ago.”

Joel patted the old car one last time and began to work his way over to the shelves filled with buckets and bins of various, uncountable engine parts. Ellie watched him go, wishing she could get that magic moment back and keep it going just a little longer.

“I wish it was red,” she said, her hand on the car, her eyes on him.

“Why red?” he asked, his back to her.

“Duh. Red’s my favorite color.”

“Oh yeah?” He looked over his shoulder at her for just a moment, one eyebrow cocked, a crooked half-smile on his lips. It almost looked as though he was filing this tidbit of information away for future reference. This smile was good too, she decided.

_I wish he smiled more. Any kind of smile will do, it seems. They all look good on him._

“Dude, half my clothes are red. Haven’t you noticed that by now?”

_Hell, I know every shirt and pair of jeans you have in that backpack of yours. I pay attention to you. How could I not?_

His eyes scanned her from head to toe. An electric tingle ran through her. She tried not to smile, but couldn’t hold it back. She pressed her lips together to dampen her grin and blushed a little, quite adorably.

“Hmmm…,” he murmured, pretending to talk to himself. “Blue jeans… white shirt… muddy sneakers… Not sure about those. I think they’re brown…”

_Oh, so that’s how it is._

She sighed dramatically, rolled her eyes, crossed her arms. He was calling her out. Uncool.

_Cocky fucker. Why do I put up with you?_

_For the same reason Tess did, I bet._

“Yeah,” he said, “I can see what you’re talkin’ about. _Clearly_ you can’t make it through a day without wearin’ red.”

“Dicky, Joel. That’s what you’re being,” she said, her eyes on the corner of the ceiling, her hands tucked into her crossed arms, cutely peeved at him, straining not to smile. She was trying to be pissed at him, damn it. “Very dicky.”

He chuckled and returned to the bins of parts.

Her voice came from behind him, challenging and punky. He found it very appealing in an Ellie sort of way. “I might be wearing red underwear. You don’t know, ‘Old Timer’.”

“No, I don’t, Red. But I’ll take your word for it,” he replied with an amused, dismissive shake of his head. She thought he was trying to hide a grin, but she couldn’t be sure.

You sure as hell ain’t wearing a bra, he thought to himself. I know that for a fact. You’ve been flashing the high beams at me on and off all day. Jesus, girl. How am I supposed to ask you to start wearing a bra again without embarrassing the hell out of both of us?

He chuckled softly at the notion without intending too.

“What’s so funny, Joel?” she asked from across the room.

“Nothin’, kid. Just thinkin’ to myself.”

“If you’re thinking to yourself about what color underwear I’m wearing then I’m gonna have to ask you the ‘boxers or briefs’ question. Just a heads up on that, dude.”

He snorted in a way she found to be very manly. He laughed, blowing her off. ”We got a sayin’ down in Texas… Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, kid.”

She giggled. Bratty, brassy. “ _You’re_ the horse I rode in on, Joel. _Wuh-Pssshhh!_ ” She cracked the invisible whip in her hand gleefully.

He sniffed, sucked his teeth, clearly outmaneuvered. He sighed very deeply. She was a clever one, this girl.

“Shut up, squirt.” It was all he could come up with. He knew it wasn’t enough.

She snickered gleefully, putting this exchange in the win column for herself. She cracked the invisible whip one more time, smugly.

“Wuh-pssh!”

_One point at a time, I’m going to win this game, Joel. Sooner or later… you’ll see._  
  


**. . .**  
  


He wasn’t having much luck. By some miracle, the ample supplies piled on the shelves in this garage hadn’t been picked clean in the years following the CBI outbreak. But the jackass who had owned this place hadn’t been much for organizing his stuff. Boxes were mislabeled, a few wrong parts were mixed into a box that otherwise had mostly the right stuff in it, some bins weren’t labeled at all. It was a nightmare to sort through.

How the hell do you run a garage with an inventory system like this, Joel wondered. Hell, even my old man’s ‘coffee cans filled with junk’ method was a better system than this.

Nearby, Ellie was searching the big red toolbox that she had shoved under the garage door to keep it open. She had no idea what he was looking for, so she was just poking around to satisfy her own idle curiosity.

“Hunh…” she said, disappointed. “These are just wrenches and screwdrivers and shit.”

He knew that opening his mouth would just lead to a conversation, but he took the plunge anyway. “Yeah? So?”

“Kind of disappointing. Not what I expected,” she said, closing the red drawers and wiping her hands on her jeans.

“What?”

“Well, I’d heard about snap-ons. But these aren’t what the older girls described. Not even close. There aren’t even any cool harnesses in here. The logo on this box lied to me.”

_They said they came in all sizes and colors too. Some of them even vibrated, or so they said. But this is just a bunch of dumb tools. Who’d put wrenches and screwdrivers and shit in a box meant for sex toys? What a gyp!_

“Ellie… Do… Do I even want to know what you’re talkin’ about?”

“Umm…” she grinned sheepishly and looked somewhere else, trying to hide her reddening face from him. “Probably not.”

“Alright then,” he said, trying to focus on the box of grommets and sparkplug boot covers he had just opened. There was obviously nothing in there that he needed, but he gave it his full attention anyway, at least until she changed the subject. “Good.”

She wandered around the garage, looking at the car again, inspecting the metal racks filled with dusty old fuel treatment bottles, idly spinning the blades of a dusty old oscillating fan, looking at a calendar on the wall. The man who owned this place had something called a ‘dosimetry’ scheduled for September 30th at 10 in the morning. She wondered if he’d ever made that appointment. The CIB outbreak happened in late September, or so she’d been told. She thought about asking Joel about, but figured that it wasn’t a subject that he cared to discuss.

She made one more circle of the garage, looking at all the things she’d already looked at before circling back to stand at his side.

“Ugh, this is so boring. What are you looking for anyway? And what’s wrong with our motorcycle exactly?”

He was digging deep into a plastic bin packed with shiny metal somethings. He didn’t look up when he spoke. “Carburetor linkage guard is banged up and it’s pinchin’ the throttle cables a little. I’m going to replace the linkage guard and tweak the bracket that the push and pull cables attach to. If I can. The damage looks pretty minor, so I think I can fix it. Probably.”

She leaned in close, probably closer than she should have, to get a closer look at all the gleaming steel whatever-they-weres in the bin. “Cool. How do you know all this stuff? Did you learn it on your road trip with Tommy?”

He smiled faintly, either pleased that she thought he was such a skilled mechanic or just enjoying having her so close. “Your friend Kristi had a nice repair manual for the bike in one of the saddlebags. I’m a reader too, kiddo.”

“That’s what you were reading last night?” she asked, looking up from the interior of the bin to smile at him in surprise. “Man, I saw you with a book and your flashlight out, and when I saw the drawing of the motorcycle on the cover, I figured it was some sort of coloring book. I was kinda mad you didn’t ask me to color with you.”

He barked a sharp laugh, his eyes making contact with hers for just a moment. Was she joking or serious? God only knew. But she sure was entertaining.

“Don’t have any crayons, Red.”

“Yeah. Me neither. Plus, I’m too old to color,” she added with a resigned shrug. Growing up was hard; you had to let go of all the fun stuff.

“You’re never too old to color, Ellie.” He chuckled. He closed the bin and moved on to the next one.

She giggled, happy that he was feeling so playful today.

“How’s your leg doin’, by the way?” he asked, looking back to check on her.

_Hey, look at that. He’s really taking an interest in me today. Cool._

“Pretty good,” she smiled, flexing her leg to show him. “Those painkillers you found at Fort Overpass are pretty awesome. Not like that stuff I slipped you at the Motel 6. That stuff really knocked you for a loop, huh?”

“By themselves, they’d probably have been just fine. But mixin’ ‘em with that booze made ‘em way too powerful. Put me on my ass, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah,” she said sheepishly, “we both acted sorta silly that night. Huh, Joel?”

“Yeah,” he snorted, trying to play it off for laughs. “We sure did, Ellie.”

Shit, I almost kissed you, he thought.

_Wow, I almost kissed you, Joel._

That would have opened up a real can of worms, he reminded himself. She sure isn’t ready to even think about stuff like that.

_I wish I’d had the balls to go through with it. We’d probably be banging by now, I guess. Shit, that’d be so fucking awesome. Right? Us banging? Yeah. Pretty cool._

_Damn right it would be, girl. Super awesome._

_Not talking to you, Inner Voice. I was talking to him._

_Then you should have said it out loud, boo._

_And have him leave my dead body in the trunk of that Camaro? No way. I’m not stupid. He wouldn’t think about kissing me in a million fucking years. But a girl can dream, okay?_

_If you say so, Ellie._

Another long silence as he dug through more containers. She hovered nearby and withstood the crushing pressure of the lack of conversation for as long as she could. Finally, long after a lesser sidekick would have folded like cheap lawn furniture, she broke the silence. It was for their own good, and he had to know that. Silence drives you crazy, just like it had with Bill, and she was clearly looking out for her partner. He needed more conversation with her! Undoubtedly, her constant small talk was all that was keeping him from going crazy!

“Felt good to have a bath again this morning. Feels nice to have clean clothes too,” she said, standing as close as she dared. “Well, _felt_ , I guess, now that I’ve got the poo water from the creek all dried into my jeans now.”

“Yeah,” he replied, his voice pleasant, almost nostalgic. ”I tell you, kid, I sure do miss hot showers.”

Ellie had never known the joys of a hot shower. She told him that. He seemed skeptical. Nothing but lukewarm water for the students, she insisted. Only the instructor’s residences in the Admin Building had hot water.

“How do you know that?” he asked, eyeing her warily.

“Some of the older girls, they spent some time there, after hours. They told me how awesome hot showers were. They sound great.”

“The instructor’s quarters? What were those girls doing there in the first place?” His eyes were hard, like she had done something wrong. She hadn’t, of course, but she quailed slightly under his glare.

“Exactly what you think they were,” she sighed, her voice a bit downbeat. It was an unpleasant truth about life in the prep school. “Some girls got in trouble so bad, there was only way to get out of it, you know? Some of the boys too, I heard.”

“Oh,” he said, remembering how some of the women he had known back in Boston had earned a few extra ration cards on the side from the soldiers ostensibly assigned to protect the civilians. “Shit like that happens, I reckon. Sorry to hear it went on in the preparatory school too.”

His tone made it clear he didn’t want to pursue this conversation any further. She was happy to let it go too.

A long, silent minute followed.

He didn’t look at her when he spoke again. If anything, he seemed to make sure he had her at his back before he said anything.

“Hope you didn’t have to do nothin’ like that, Ellie.”

“No!” she said, probably a little too quickly, a bit too loudly. “No, Joel. I was _way too young_ for that shit. I was, like, thirteen when I was there. Don’t worry about me. I never had to do anything like that. I never got in that much trouble. I got tossed in the box a few times, but nothing that was gonna get me expelled. I swear.”

“Okay, good,” he said.

“Yeah. I was a freshman up on the floor with the senior girls,” she explained unnecessarily, as she often did, “so I saw a lot of that stuff going on. But I was never asked to… um… visit anybody’s office. You know… ‘after hours’ and stuff. I was a real troublemaker but I was still pretty young. Like I said, this was back when I was thirteen. I was just a kid. But it’s a good thing I got outta there when I did, I guess.”

“Yeah. I reckon so.” He shook his head sadly, not at her but at the godawful shitty mess this world had become.

She didn’t know that. She thought it was directed at her. She tugged at her fingertips, shuffled in place a bit.

_I really didn’t, Joel. I swear._

More silence. Ellie hated silence. She wanted to talk to him about something, anything. She needed to get something else off her chest.

_I hope he’s ready to talk about something important. Really important. And really talk about it too._

“Joel…? Can I talk to you for a minute?”

He hesitated for only a second. He was getting better at dealing with her. He knew this tone. It was her serious conversation voice. He hoped she didn’t want to talk about sex or something. Not after what she’d just told him. He didn’t know what on earth he would say if she confessed to something related to that terrible mess she’d spoken about.

“Sure,” he said, looking at her with his best expression of understanding, bracing himself for the worst. She was just thirteen at the time. Surely those sick army bastards didn’t… “What is it, kid?”

She stared at her shoes, suddenly uncomfortable with his gaze. “I…um… I had a nightmare about shooting that guy.”

He breathed an audible sigh of relief, trying his best not to think about the world he was living in these days where he’d rather hear a teenage girl confess to brutally killing a man than being told she had been coerced into having sex with one.

What a fucking world, he thought to himself. Christ almighty, you deserve a better life than this, girl.

“Which guy, Ellie?”

_Fuck, I can’t believe I’ve shot so many people that I need to specify._

“The one guy whose arm I blew off. Back at Fort Overpass.”

He dismissed it with a wave of his hand, going back to his boxes.

“You can’t dwell on stuff like that, Ellie. It was either him or you.”

“But I blew his fucking arm off, Joel. It was scary as fuck. And gross!”

“I know it was, kiddo. But he didn’t leave you much choice. You did what you had to do. You gotta leave it at that or it’ll worry you sick. Okay?” He never even looked at her.

She huffed in annoyance. “I’m just not as comfortable with killing as you are, I guess.”

“You get used to it,” he shrugged. “Just give it time. I know it’s rough, but it gets easier.”

She spoke softly, under her breath. “God, I sure hope not.”

**. . .**  
  


He had studied the shelves for almost an hour, looking through the dozens and dozens of various parts bins stacked along them. The part he needed had to be in here somewhere. There was a damn Honda assembly plant just down the highway from this little podunk town. Half the damn cars rusting down to their frames out on the street were Hondas. There was no way the parts he needed weren’t in one of these bins. He knelt on the concrete, his knees not happy about that, while he dug through the cardboard boxes of unsorted, leftover parts stashed beneath an old workbench. This was the last place left to look.

“1969…” said Ellie from the other side of the room, sitting on a stacked pile of boxes filled with canned motor oil. She was swinging her legs, thumping her heels against the cardboard cases, looking out the window, clearly working a lot of math in her head. Her canteen was in her hand, half empty. “So… Were you alive in 1969?”

He snorted with good humor, knowing she didn’t mean to offend – probably. “No, kid. I wasn’t born until 1984.”

“Wow. 84. That’s still pretty far back there though, Joel. I’m impressed.”

“Impressed that I ain’t keeled over yet?” he chuckled, feeling his age just a bit and wondering at just how incredibly ancient he must look to her eyes. “I got a few good years left in me before they haul me off to the glue factory, young’un.”

“I didn’t mean it _that way_ ,” she giggled, looking at him, hoping he would look at her. He didn’t, and whatever it was she might have meant, she didn’t elaborate. He was just as happy to let it go. He didn’t need to be told how old he was. She was too afraid to tell him that she thought he was in great shape to be a zillion years old.

_Damn good shape. Dude’s aging like a fine wine. I think that’s how that saying goes. Wine gets better with age, right? It’s not like milk or truck batteries, I’m pretty sure._

_I’ve never had wine. One more thing to add to the list in my head, I guess._

_Item 56: Share a bottle of wine with Joel… In front of a roaring fireplace… On a zebra skin rug…Naked…_

_Woo! Can’t wait to check that one off._

She smiled impishly, considering the future she might have with him if he would just cooperate and get on board with her secret plan already. Her eyes widened in surprise as she realized the one key detail she had overlooked. She pursed her lips, nodded to herself. He never saw the solemn expression on her face as she updated the list like the dutiful, professional record keeper she was.

_Item 57: Find a zebra skin rug. Don’t tell Joel why you need it or what it’s for._

**. . .**  
  


“Goddamn. Took me long enough,” Joel said, the prized bracket in hand. It was a perfect (and notably dent free) match for the one he had pulled from his backpack. He opened his backpack, and began to wrap the part up in a few of the shop towels she had scrounged up earlier. His small canvas parts bag was full to bursting. Despite the frustrations the long search had provoked, this had been a very productive hour for him.

Ellie hopped down from the workbench where she’d been sitting over his head for the last ten minutes, doing her best not to rest her feet on his broad back as he searched – he did not care for that, as it had turned out. He was not a footstool and had reminded her of such in a very firm, very growly, slightly scary, incredibly sexy voice. She had almost risked putting her feet up on him a second time just to hear that voice again.

She was bursting with energy and ready to get going. An hour spent in a garage was boring as hell. Doubly so once she’d discovered that the old Camaro wouldn’t start. She’d wanted to sit behind the wheel and pretend she was hauling ass down the highway, shifting gears, squalling tires, squishing bandits and grinding infected under her big mag wheels, but with Joel sitting just a few feet away, she’d thought better of it. Make believe was something little kids did. Badass almost-adult sidekicks like her smacked bandits around for real.

“Of course it would be in the last box you look in, right?” she said, kneeling down very close to him to have a look at the part as he wrapped it up in the red terrycloth towels she had found in a drawer. She hadn’t been totally useless this hour.

“Last box there _was_ to look in, kiddo. No joke. I was scrapin’ the bottom of the barrel here.”

“So we’re done? We’re going back to camp?” she asked, edging towards the door, eager to get the hell out of this incredibly boring room that she was tired of half an hour ago.

“Yeah, let’s go.”

He didn’t half to tell her twice. She was on all fours and scooting under the low, partially open door into the daylight outside before he had finished the sentence. He shook his head, smiling. He took one more look at the old Chevy Camaro and patted its hood ruefully.

“Sure wish you ran, old girl,” he said in a low voice meant for intimacy. “You and me would’ve shown that girl a helluva good time.”

“Come on, Joel! Let’s go! I’m getting gray hairs out here!” a high voice piped in from under the door.

He sighed, allowing himself to think about better days in a better world for just one moment longer, and then he was crawling under the door and back into the world of shit.

**. . .**  
  


“Okay, all clear,” she said, giving the red toolbox one last push with her foot before scrambling out of the way.

He lowered the door all the way to the ground, sealing the garage shut and leaving the old Camaro safely hidden inside.

“This way nobody can get to the car, right?” she asked, sidling up close to him.

“Yeah,” he said, shrugging almost as though he were a little embarrassed about the whole thing. “Just… don’t seem right lettin’ the elements get to it… you know?”

“I understand,” she chirped. She elbowed him affectionately. “You’ll let the rain fall on me, but not your precious car. I see how you are.”

“Stuff a sock in it, Red,” he grumbled, tousling her ponytail again. “I don’t tease you about the way you keep your Savage Starlight comics all safe and dry in that big Ziploc bag. Don’t you go teasin’ me about takin’ care of what might be the last vintage Chevy Camaro on earth, alright?”

“Deal,” she said, hefting the hunting rifle up, ready to move out. “Back to camp now?”

The garage was on the edge of the small town. He looked, studying the place from a distance, weighing his options. There was still quite a bit of daylight left and camp was already made, just waiting for them to return.

She stood close, watching him think. “Thinking about visiting?”

“Maybe.”

“Might find something useful,” she enthused, her voice a sweet singsong melody. She wanted to see the place. She loved seeing new places.

“Yeah… maybe…”

He looked up at the sky. It was maybe three in the afternoon. It didn’t get dark until almost eight this time of year. Plenty of daylight left if they were quick about it.

“Whaddya think, Ellie? Want to go to East Liberty today? We can paint the town red.”

“What? Red? Oh! With blood! Okay, I got it. Sure, let’s go.” She nodded. She didn’t like violence, but it was just a part of life, the price you paid to see new places sometimes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Total author insert moment here. My first car was a 1969 Camaro Rally Sport. I found it in a junkyard and spent two years of my life restoring it in time for my sixteenth birthday. Mine was blue, not yellow, but it had a big motor and was way too much car for me. Just after turning seventeen, I completely totaled it. I was doing something very dumb and I was lucky to walk away from it with only minor injuries. I’ve owned many cars and motorcycles since that first one, but my ’69 RS still holds a place in my heart.
> 
> In my quasi-official timeline, Joel was born in 1984 (September 27, according to the circled date on Sarah’s calendar). Sarah was born in the summer of 2001, making her barely 12 when the outbreak hit. Tommy was born in 1990 and was 23 at the time of the outbreak.
> 
> And that’s it for this batch of notes. See you here on Wednesday when Joel and Ellie risk a trip into the isolated town with the blown up bridge. Chapter Six: Ghosts of Liberty.


	6. Ghosts of Liberty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel and Ellie explore an abandoned town and she learns more about how the world was before everything went to hell.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 06 – Ghosts Of Liberty**

 

Main Street in East Liberty was like the other main streets she’d seen on this journey. Lots of rusted cars parked in front of small, empty shops with broken windows. Trash blew across the cracked, weathered asphalt. Grass grew tall in many of these cracks, and small animals watched them warily from the concealment the green stalks provided. From the looks of it, nobody had been here in a long time.

The shotgun was in his hands. The hunting rifle in hers. Ellie and Joel were crouched behind an old, six-wheeled flatbed truck at the far edge of town, where the forest, thick with elm and maple trees, had been trimmed back years ago to make room for the lawns and parking lots of East Liberty. Nature was slowly replacing the latter with the former. Trees were sprouting up everywhere. The forest was returning here. Birds sang in the young trees. Ellie wanted to whistle along with them but Joel was taking things very seriously, so she did too.

“There,” he said, his voice low. He pointed. “See it?”

She looked. Several blocks down Main Street, in the parking lot of the old Post Office, there was an old, broken-down, green van. The remnants of an old camp were strewn around it.

“Hunters? Smugglers?” she whispered, edging just a little closer to him.

“Nah. The camp’s too old for hunters or scavengers. And no call for smugglers this far out from a QZ. Look,” he said, pointing again, “on the other side of the van.”

She looked again. Squinted.

He was right. Something was there, just around the edge of the old green van. Something moved, half-glimpsed through the open side door on the other side of the dirty old windows. It had a human outline, but it didn’t move the way a human would.

“Infected?” she whispered.

“Yeah. I think so.”

She looked to him, started to unsling the shortened shotgun from her back, offered the scoped rifle to him. He shook his head.

“We’re not going to shoot them? Sneak around then? Or go back?” she asked, confused.

“I’m not going to shoot them. You are. You wanted to carry the rifle, remember.”

Her face broke into a broad grin as she realized what was being entrusted to her.

He nodded, seeing that she was on the same page with him. “I’ll lure them out and you put a bullet in them, okay?”

She put her serious face on. “Sounds like a plan, boss.”

“Now you listen, Ellie,” he said, placing a box of .30-06 rounds on the hood of the car. His other hand was on her shoulder, his eyes serious, his voice stern. “We got plenty of ammo for the rifle now. More than twenty rounds. But if your shots draw out a bunch of runners or clickers, more than we can handle, we haul ass back for the garage or the creek before they can spot us. Okay? We don’t need to clean out this town if it’s filled up to the top with them. We don’t need supplies that bad. We can just let ‘em be, right?”

“Gotcha. I’ve got my running shoes on. You just say the word, Joel. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

“Good girl.” He patted the hood of the truck gently. “Get set up here and let me know when you’re ready.”

“Roger dodger.”

He looked around, found a red brick just a few feet away, near a low wall that once guarded a nice lawn, before the house had burned to the ground at some unknown point in the past. He jogged out to the middle of street, holding the brick in a way that seemed strange to her. He faced off to the side, cocked the arm clutching the brick, holding it up near his ear, his other arm raised and extended, almost as though he was using it to aim. He stepped forward, pivoting his hips, his throwing arm rising in a fast, tight arc. The brick flew from his fingers, sailed high through the air, easily covering the span to the distant Post Office parking lot. It landed with a sharp crack, shattering into a cloud of red chunks.

Ellie thought it was amazing. She had never seen a game of football played before. She had no idea what a ‘Hail Mary’ pass was. She grinned, showing lots of white teeth. She didn’t cheer, even though she wanted to.

_He’s gotta show me how to do that! I could raise all kinds of hell if I could throw a brick that far!_

He saw her grinning. He grinned in return, quickly, before dropping low to the street and pointing with his finger to direct her attention back to the old green van by the Post Office.

_Oh shit! I almost forgot!_

She pressed her belly against the fender of the big truck, resting the rifle in her arms across the hood. She spread her legs for stability, raised herself up on her toes, helping her elbows to reach the top of the truck’s hood easily. She braced herself against the coming recoil and peered through the scope. Joel forced himself not to notice how long her legs seemed to be at the moment, how firm her thighs, how perfectly sculpted the round globes of her ass appeared to him as she steadied herself to fire with accuracy.

Two clickers had been concealed behind the van. They staggered about near where the brick had smashed against the blacktop. They twitched and jerked, clicking in all directions, trying to locate the source of the disturbance. She and Joel were much too far away for their echolocation to detect.

The shot was lined up. She leaned into the truck, her weight on the balls of her feet. She took a deep breath, exhaled it slowly through full, puckered lips. Joel swallowed hard and looked away lest she see him staring at her mouth. She gently squeezed the trigger.

The shot rang out with a loud crack. The clicker’s head burst apart in much the same manner as the brick had moments before. It fell to the ground in a limp, lifeless heap. The other clicker was whirling around, trying to find the source of the sound. Ellie cycled the bolt as fast as she could, working a new round into the chamber. She returned her eye back to the scope quickly, located the remaining clicker, pressed her belly into the fender, steadied the weapon, exhaled…

A thundering boom, a plume of fire and smoke, and the second clicker fell dead, half its head spraying out across the parking lot. The report of the rifle echoed off the empty houses around them and bounced down the street.

Joel jogged over to the front bumper of the truck, stopped very close to her.

“Got ‘em,” she said, quite pleased with herself, letting her legs relax, standing flatfooted by the large truck.

“Keep your eyes open!” he hissed. “There might be more.”

“Right!” She chambered a fresh round and scanned the streets, up on her toes again.

_Good shot, Ellie!_

_Thank you, Joel!_

A few long, dreadful seconds passed. A late-stage stalker appeared further down the street, coming out of an old record store. The fungus on its face had already claimed one eye and the other was almost lost as well, almost half pushed out of the socket. Ellie doubted it could see more than ten or twenty feet, and probably only basic shapes and rudimentary outlines. She shivered at the sight of the poor, vile thing. Thin, disgusting tendrils had emerged from the abomination’s nostrils as well, curling across its face and pulling one corner of the mouth up into a perpetual sneer. Overworked sinuses tried to cope with the intrusion, leaving a thick, slimy mass of snot across the mouth and chin. A runny nose that would only end when the parasite inside finally managed to rip the sinus cavities apart. It wouldn’t be much longer, judging from the development of the stalker. When it turned its head to look to the right, Ellie could see how the front of the face was beginning to bulge out, protruding and distending as the infection inside the skull began to push out, growing and expanding until soon the bone would crack and split apart from the never-ending pressure of the fungus. Only a few weeks left, from the look of things, and this stalker would finally become a clicker. The image of two small stalkers came to her: a fair-skinned one with clumps of red hair still clinging to its swollen skull, and its companion, a darker-skinned, slightly taller one, dressed in cool combat boots and the tattered rags that had been a denim shirt, a small white dove, dingy and unwashed, ironed on to the sleeve, still clinging there as the fabric rotted around it. Would they still be able to recognize each other? Would they still be friends? Would they go hunting for victims together?

_Goddamnit, Ellie. FOCUS!_

Ellie wiped at her eye and peered through the scope again. Joel thought it was sweat that had gotten into her eye and spoiled her aim. She would let him think that.

It waited in the darkened doorway, looking around warily, senses commanded by the parasite to seek out prey. Food or a new host for the infection. It would take whatever came its way. The bullet slamming into its face was not what it expected to find.

Ellie opened the bolt, quickly loading a trio of fresh rounds into the weapon.

“Two more clickers,” he hissed, his shotgun ready. “From that 7-11. And another one up there by the old laundromat.”

She took a quick breath, leaned into the old truck, steadied herself on the balls of her feet, and took aim. She exhaled slowly. The metal trigger of the Winchester was warm now from the lingering presence of her finger. She squeezed it gently.

**. . .**

More than a dozen clickers and a handful of late-stage stalkers lay dead in the street. The hood of the old white truck was littered with nineteen empty brass casings. Smoke wafted lazily up from the barrel of the old Winchester. Ellie loaded her last two rounds into the rifle’s internal magazine.

No more infected had stepped out into the street for almost two minutes now. Joel was looking around, checking every nook and cranny that he could see from his vantage point.

“I think that may be all of them, Red.”

“Good,” she said, letting a long breath escape her nostrils. She had been holding her breath without realizing it. “I hope you’ve got more ammo for this thing back with the bike. I’m almost out.“

“A little,” he said, looking forlornly at all the spent casings on the hood of the truck. Precious ammo. Spent for a good cause, sure, but irreplaceable nonetheless. “Maybe eight or nine rounds, I think. It’s in the saddlebag with all that shotgun ammo.”

She relaxed, took another deep, calming breath and allowed her heels to rest on the blacktop. Standing on her toes for that long wasn’t pleasant. She had a quick flash of Tala’s pretty, red high heels back at the Motel 6 and wondered how the hell women had ever managed such a thing as walking around on their toes all day.

“How much ammo you have left?” he asked.

“Not much,” she said, holding up the empty little carton with the neat Winchester ‘Super X’ logo. She shook it to prove her point. “Two rounds in the gun, no more in the box.”

“It was enough, yeah? And you didn’t waste any of ‘em by missin’. Nice shootin’.”

“Fuck yeah it was. Admit it, Joel,” she brightened, teased, grinning beautifully, leaning just a little closer to him even though he was already quite close. “ _You’re impressed_.”

“I am. And that’s a fact.”

“Hee hee. I’m starting to wonder which one of is the sidekick, Old Timer.”

“Careful, Red. You’re ego is startin’ to write checks your little butt might not be able to cover.”

Ellie had only the vaguest idea what checks were, but she knew a challenge when she heard one.

“Stop looking at my butt, you perv,” she needled fondly, never guessing how much her backside was drawing his eyes lately. “I’m not like the other teenage girls you dragged around the around the country for the last twenty years. I’m gonna write _all_ the checks I want. _I’m dangerous_.”

She giggled, wanting to banter and boast with him, and he did his best not to take the bait. He remembered too well the faces of the women who had trusted him back when the crew was still together. They were all just as pretty as this girl. And they were all dead now.

“C’mon, kiddo. Let’s get up there and see if there’s anything work takin’.”

“‘Kay.” She slung the rifle across her back, which wasn’t easy. It was a big gun for a short, dangerous, check writer like herself. But she managed. The shortened double barreled shotgun was ready in her small hands. She took up a watchful position to his left as they began the walk into East Liberty.

 

* * *

 

 ‘Flying High’ wasn’t a record store. It was a ‘head shop’, or so Joel said. She had no idea what that meant, but it was a place filled with t-shirts dyed in crazy colorful patterns, weird things called ‘black light’ posters, oddly shaped doodads that were probably glass flower holders, turquoise rings, incense, scented candles, pins (she took a cool silver skull one for her backpack), jewelry, patches, caps, tons and tons of old vinyl records, and all kinds of interesting things. Joel kept an eye on the door while she nosed around. She was glad he didn’t treat her like a little kid, the way Henry had treated Sam. She knew she couldn’t stay in here all day, but as long as she was quick, he was content to let her look around and maybe take a few little things. It wasn’t stealing. It wasn’t like there had been any other customers in here recently.

“You about done, Ellie?”

“Almost,” she said, looking at a small display case of body jewelry. “What the heck is a belly chain?”

“Just what it sounds like. A chain you wear around your belly.”

“Why? Who’d ever see it?”

“If you were wearing a belly shirt or a tube top, everybody would see it.”

“Oh, I get it,” she nodded, a puzzled expression on her face, not sure what the hell a tube top was. A belly shirt seemed pretty self-explanatory, if a bit silly. She looked at another intriguingly labeled display. “So I guess nipple rings are…”

“Something we ain’t gonna talk about, girl.” Joel snorted, with a shake of his head. He chuckled, his eyes on the street. “Jesus…”

She giggled and took a small gold necklace with a 9mm bullet pendant. The paper next to the little box it was displayed informed her that it was made from genuine 10 karat gold (whatever that was) and it had been molded from a real bullet.

_Waste of ammo, if you ask me. But it is pretty cool looking._

She saw a cool knife with what must have been a zillion little tools built into it. The chip-resistant enamel handle was painted up like the American flag. She checked to make sure he wasn’t looking and slipped into her open backpack.

_Gotta remember to ask him when his birthday is. Or else I can save this for Christmas. We’ll still be together by then, right? He’s got to see how useful I am by now, right?_

She zipped up her pack and shouldered it. She could only barely feel the weight of it. He’d told her to travel light, leaving most of their non-essential gear back at their hidden camp. She didn’t even have a change of socks in here. It felt weird to have such a light pack after so many weeks spent lugging around her entire life inside it.

“Okay. Ready to go.”

“You didn’t get a bong, did you? Cause you ain’t old enough for one of those things yet.” He teased her amiably, looking down at her as she stood close to him near the doorway.

“I am too old enough!” she insisted. “And what the fuck is a bong? Is it a sex toy?”

His eyes widened and he looked away, already regretting the can of worms he had just opened. “Jesus Christ, kid. C’mon. Let’s go. There might be something in that 7-11 over there.”

She followed him out the door, doggedly pursuing the previous conversation.

“It is a sex toy, isn’t it? Joel! Shame on you! Why kind of person do you think I am? And I bet I’m plenty old for that kind of stuff. I’ll betcha a can of chili that I am!”

“Hush. And stay close. And stop lyin’, girl. Neither one of us’ve got a can of chili.”

“Fine!” She said, trying to sound as gruff as him. She giggled and stuck close to his heels.

_The better to see your butt in those jeans, buddy._

 

* * *

 

The 7-11 was a bust. So was Patty’s Diner around the corner. Ellie was standing in the parking lot, looking at the old, empty beauty salon in front of her, trying to wrap her mind around the concept. Her shotgun dangled limply from one hand. She scratched her head in puzzlement with the other.

“Joel… C’mon, dude. Don’t fuck with me. I’m an awesome sidekick. Don’t lie to me like this.”

“Not jokin’, Ellie. That’s what they did. Clip hair, trim nails, shampoo and style. All that silly stuff.”

It was clear from her face that she didn’t believe a word of it. She looked at the sign over the broken windows and read it again. If this was a lie, it was a pretty convincing one.

“‘The Precious Paw,’” she read. “‘The Place For Pampered Pets.’”

“Yep,” he said, shrugging because how on earth could he explain the idea of a beauty salon for house pets to a girl that had never been in a regular beauty parlor and had probably never had a cat or a dog as a pet in her life.

“Sweet fuck… Just when I think I understand what the world was like before… you drop something like _this_ in my lap… I’m…. speechless,” she said, her eyes still not making much sense of it. She shrugged her small shoulders in defeat. It was just too much.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I didn’t understand a bunch of it myself, kid. And I lived through it. Hell, one of these days, get me good and drunk and I’ll try to explain tween television shows to you.”

“Tween” she repeated, rolling the strange word around in her mouth, thinking it must be a sport that she’d never heard of before. She smiled, “Cool. Sure thing, Joel.”

Joel felt the cracked glass of his old watch beneath the calloused palm of his hand. He didn’t remember reaching for the watch, but he remembered how much Sarah had loved iCarly. What a dumb show that had been, but hell if it hadn’t made his baby girl laugh.

I guess that Gibby kid was pretty funny, he thought to himself.

 

* * *

 

It was her last magazine, the high capacity one. The other three lay empty near her feet, the equally empty shotgun rested close by, smoke rising from its twin barrels She had a few good shells left for it in her pack, but there wasn’t time to dig them out. A pair of empty, scorched sea green shells lay on the blacktop a few feet away, useless and discarded. Almost a score of brass pistol casings were scattered everywhere around her, twinkling on the rusting trunk of the ‘88 Pontiac Grand Am and shining like little gold nuggets across the cracked surface of the old parking lot. Lovely green blades of grass grew in thick ribbons everywhere the aging blacktop had split apart. Flowers sprouted here and there, fragrant and lovely in the warm sun of early October, their pleasant aroma mixing with the sharp smell of the gunpowder swirling in the air around her. The long magazine slid into her compact pistol and locked in place with a click. The slide snapped closed. The Beretta was ready for one last volley of shooting.

“Almost out!” she shouted to Joel, who knelt next to her, facing the other way, putting the last four bullets into his revolver. They were surrounded, fighting virtually back to back.

“Me too!” he barked, raising the Taurus towards the nearest screeching clicker shambling towards them, clawing at the empty air. “Keep it up! There’s only a few left!”

“Better be the last ones,” she shouted, trying to be heard over the roar of his .357 magnum. Her Beretta bucked in her hand, spitting fire and spewing more cooked brass across the parking lot. “Or else I think we’re fucked!”

But he wasn’t listening. This wasn’t the time to talk. The parking lot of the IGA grocery store was strewn with empty shell casings, spent red shotgun shells, broken two-by-fours, snapped shivs, cracked bricks, and more dead infected that he wanted to count at the moment. The last few clickers in town were coming their way in that spasmodic way that would have been funny if it wasn’t the broken shell of person doing the twitching.

The .357 clicked empty. He pulled out his .45 automatic. Last gun. Two spare magazines for it. Only three or four infected left. He had more than enough rounds. It was close, but it was going to be okay.

“Three more coming from the Walgreen’s!” she shouted, lining up the sights on her little gun to account for these new targets. “And one more from the hardware store!”

“Fuck,” he muttered and the gun in his hand began to launch more brass and lead into the warm air.

 

* * *

 

“No evacuation notices,” she observed, swapping the last three rounds in her oversized magazine into one of the smaller ones. Easier to carry in the waistband of her pants that way. The loaded shotgun hung from her shoulder by its leather strap. Two spare shells left for it now, safe in her front pocket, and within easy reach.

_Thank God I’ve got more ammo for my pistol back at the camp. I hope Joel does too._

“At least,” she continued, “I didn’t see any down there.”

“Nope. You’re right. There weren’t any. Not that I saw, anyway.” Joel pushed through the piles of empty carton and cans in the corner of the room. His voice was soft but his eyes were hard. He’d used his last shiv to open that door and there wasn’t a damn thing in here worth taking. He glanced at the wall across from the boarded over window again, his flashlight providing more light in this apartment than what meager light managed to push its way into this well-secured place. The words had been written on the wall with streaks of black shoe polish from the looks of it.

          4 years. Nobody left but me.  
          Stopped looking for dad.  
          Sister buried in woods behind.  
          No food. No ammo. No choice.  
          Tony Hills Jr. 05/23/17 I think

Below the words, a long dead man lay slumped on the ruined carpet, the .44 that had punched out the side of his skull was lying next to him. The gun was empty, a single spent casing in the cylinder. There was no ammunition for it anywhere in the place. Joel had checked… three times. Nothing. No food. No supplies. All used up a long time ago.

Should’ve just got the damn part for the bike and hightailed it back to camp, he thought. Shot off too much ammo in this rotten dump and not a damn thing to show for it. A full clip in my Colt. Half a spare clip. And not one bullet to find in this whole damn town. And not much left back in camp either, except for shotgun ammo.

Ellie’s voice broke the silence.

“No posters in the windows or on the telephone poles, like in Bill’s town. None of those big signs with wheels out in the streets. Nothing to tell people what to do… where to go… FEDRA didn’t warn them at all. Why wouldn’t they warn these people?”

Ellie let the words hang for a minute. She could sense Joel was in a foul mood now. They’d shot off a lot of ammo in this town, and except for few dusty bottles of alcohol and a box of bandages they’d scrounged up in the drug store, there wasn’t much to show for it. He would probably be surly for the rest of the day. Maybe she’d break out one of the joke books later, when he’d had a little time to cool off.

While she crouched on the threadbare carpet, keeping watch from just inside the doorway, he stood up, empty handed, his mouth a hard line of disappointment.

“Lot of places didn’t get any warnin’, Ellie.” He wiped his hands on his jeans. Sixteen years of dust had made this place filthy. “These people probably thought their town was so out of the way that maybe the infection would pass them by long enough for the government to get a handle on things.”

“But it never did,” she said, understanding, understating.

_They must have been so scared. Months going by. Then years. God, they must have been so scared. I wonder how long it took for one of them to get infected? And then how fast did it spread once it happened? If only there’d been a vaccine back then…I wish I could have helped them somehow._

“It never did,” he sighed, surveying the living room one last time. “FEDRA was on the radio and the TV every night. This was back when the electrical grid was still up outside the zones and the local transmitters hadn’t been abandoned, yeah? They kept tellin’ everyone that it was all gonna get better soon. Just stay put and we’ll come and get you. That’s what they always said, kiddo. Be safe and be smart and _stay put_ … Christ, what a buncha horseshit that was.”

“Why didn’t they come get these people? If they said they were going to come, then why just leave them here like this? There’s a QZ up in Columbus, right? They could have sent a few of those trucks we saw down here to pick them up. I don’t get it.”

He looked at her. She was sincere. Ellie had depended on FEDRA her whole life for everything. She didn’t like them, but she had no real reason to truly hate them. She didn’t understand the brutal, inhumane decisions that come easy to a committee tasked with saving the few that they could at any cost.

“They couldn’t get everyone, Ellie. FEDRA knew that right from the start, even if these people didn’t. There weren’t enough quarantine zones and even if there had been, the more people on the move, the more people are gonna get infected trying to get to one. FEDRA didn’t want them showin’ up on their front door and spreadin’ cordyceps through the big refugee camps outside the walls. It spreads fast in a place like that. I’ve seen it happen. It’s like a match dropped in a puddle of gasoline if it ain’t put down fast. And so the army rolls in and _everybody_ in the camp gets put down, infected or not. That’s just how it was, Ellie. It was never anything personal, if that makes any sense to you.”

“So… they just left these people here… to die,” she said flatly. “Because that was the safest thing to do?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Dead people don’t get infected,” she muttered, shaking her head, remembering his words. He’d said them to her back in Pittsburgh, outside the walls of that fallen QZ.

_How long ago was that? Two weeks? Maybe more? Or maybe a little less? I’m not sure. It’s getting hard to keep track of how many days it’s been since we left Boston. Joel said this would happen. That time gets funny when you’re ‘on the trail’. He was right. He’s right about a lot of stuff._

She stood up as he approached her. An old, yellowing newspaper was in his hands. ‘American Foundation’ was written across the top of it in large, bold letters. Beneath that, smaller but no less bold: “A FEDRA Publication. May/July - 2014’.

“Here,” he said, handing her the paper.

Ellie took it with raised eyebrows. She looked at it, scanning the words on the old, cheap newsprint. ‘FEDRA Officials Confront CDC’ the headline read. ‘Latest Vaccination Efforts A Failure’.

“Next time we’re in camp and you got a little free time, you can read this,” he said.

“Sure, Joel,” she said absently, her eyes still on the paper.

The secondary headlines read ‘Air Force Increases Humanitarian Outreach Efforts To Help Victims Of Texas Uprising. Rebel Forces In Nevada Petition For Surrender’ and next to that article ‘Army Search Teams Continue To Find Survivors And Relocate Them To QZs. Could Your Town Be Next? We Talk To The FEDRA Managers In Charge of Rescue Operations’.

He placed his hand on her shoulder. “And if you want, maybe we’ll talk about it some. Couldn’t hurt for you to know somethin’ about those days, I reckon. A little bit of it, anyway.”

She looked up at him, mild surprise on her face. Joel was rarely the one to invite conversation around the campfire.

“Thanks, Joel.” She smiled warmly, folding the paper up to fit in her backpack.

Joel’s face was stone, but his voice was thick with old anger. “And every goddamn word in there’s a lie. Trust me on that, kiddo.”

Her smile fell as he edged around her and stepped out into the dim hallway, his big .45 in hand.

 

* * *

 

They were halfway across the muddy creek, the girl happily riding on the shoulders of the man again, the water lapping delicately at the curves of her butt. The sun would be setting soon. The better part of a day spent in a fruitless search effort in a town long ago picked clean by the town’s sole surviving resident, also long dead. Joel tried not to think about it. Ellie made it easy for him.

“Man,” she enthused, idly running her fingers through the hair on his head in a way that wasn’t at all unpleasant “the way that sunlight’s hitting that water is really pretty, huh?”

Joel looked. The yellow-red light spilled across the surface of the rippling water like molten gold. Joel carved a path through shimmering luminescence with sure steps, Ellie kicking her feet gently in the water as he went.

“Yeah. It sure is,” he replied, the water almost up to his chin, wetting his beard as he spoke. “Hell of a day, huh?”

“It wasn’t all bad, dude. I pulled off a bunch of nice sniper shots against some clickers, got in a lot of practice with my pistol, and best of all, I got to see some classic American muscle.”

”Muscle _car_ ,” he corrected gently.

She remembered his arms and shoulders as the through that brick farther than she had ever suspected a brick could fly. She remembered the wet denim clinging to his ass and thighs as he emerged from the creek. She remembered how savagely he had beaten those infected to death in the parking lot of the grocery store… thick, corded muscles swinging a two-by-four with brutal skill… keeping the monsters away from her, no matter how many of them came pouring out of that store… always keeping her safe. She smiled slyly.

_Wasn’t talking about the car, dude._

“Oh, you hush up now, boy,” she cooed affectionately in her best Texan drawl. “Be a good horsie and get Ol’ Ellie across this here rushin’ river. I gotta make it to camp before it gets dark and the banditos come out. Hyah! Giddyup now! _Wuh-psssh!_ ”

Joel chuckled silently. She didn’t hear him, but she felt his body vibrate with it.

“Girl, I’m gonna smack the freckles off you when we get across this creek.” They both knew he was joking.

“Am I cruising for a bruising, Joel?” she teased, craning her head down to look at him.

“Hell yes, you are. I swear, you little twerp. Stop sassin’ me. You’re damn lucky if I don’t decide to paddle your ass for actin’ like this, ‘specially after a day like we just had.”

She shuddered in delight at the prospect and tried to conceal her body’s quivering response with a dismissive laugh that was just little too loud.

She patted his head tenderly. She loved this man, she was so sure of it now. She leaned down as much as she could, until her lips were close enough to his forehead for him to feel the warmth of her breath when she spoke.

“You wouldn’t do that to me… would you, Joel?” she cooed.

“I swear kid,” he grumbled warmly, patting the outside of her thigh with his big hand, “one of these days you’re gonna _get it_. Hard. Push me and see if I’m jokin’, girl.”

She smiled and felt very bratty… and very warm inside. Her eyelids were heavy, her expression dreamy. She wanted to be punished by him, and in just the right way. She pulled his hair in a not quite gentle fashion and spoke in a teasing half-whisper.

“Giddyup, boy.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to Michelle for bringing me up to speed on iCarly and Gibby. Joel was a pretty good dad if he watched “Tween” shows with Sarah.
> 
> Ellie was nice enough to get Joel a birthday or Christmas present. I wonder if that will payoff in some future chapter? 
> 
> Check back on Saturday when Joel and Ellie find some Fireflies in Chapter Seven: Marlene.


	7. Marlene

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and Joel find some Fireflies.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 07 – Marlene**

 

Three days it has rained. Three fucking days. Three motherfucking days of hiding in this rotting mall, huddling in the darkness, waiting, praying, hiding in the store with all the monster masks, the rubber eyeballs, the plastic vampire teeth, and Skeleseer, who had told the truth after all. They did get their water guns back. Half-filled with stale water, they had kept her thirst at bay these three days. Emptied at last, she has left them behind, left almost everything behind. The water guns, Riley’s pistol, the little glow-in-the dark jack-o’-lantern key chain she’d swiped from the Spooky Town store, the tokens she found on the cracked vinyl seat of the ‘Road Blasters’ game at Raja’s arcade. All gone. Memories she doesn’t want anymore. Bad memories, already turning to nightmares. Despite all the things she lacked as a child – love, hugs, attention, a home – Ellie Williams has usually slept pretty well. But not anymore. Maybe never again. Two nights have passed since she was bitten, two nights filled with nightmares: the scaffolding tearing away; the awful slow-motion fall; the clawing hands, the gnashing teeth; the bite, the fucking bite; the friend she couldn’t save; the form in the darkness, backlit by the streetlights below, twitching and jerking near the edge of the roof, soaked with falling rain, muttering, groaning, whispering alien words in the secret and blasphemous language of cordyceps, a vile parody of the person she had loved so much; the cold aluminum doorknob, wet and slick under her straining, outstretched fingertips; the heavy, hateful steel of the gun in her hand; the hot tears on her cheeks, spilling out faster than the rain could wash away; the choice to run or fight; her lungs aching, breath held, trying not to make a sound; the thunder overhead; the prayers unanswered.

Three days. Three days and she still hasn’t turned. Everyone turns in two. People her size usually turn in one day, give or take. Riley turned in less than that. Twenty hours, tops. That’s all it took. Now she is gone. Ellie is all that’s left. And she still hasn’t turned.

She clenches her fists, feels the rage and the heartbreak churning inside her. She wants to cry. She wants break something. She wants to scream. Not roar, as Riley had encouraged her to do, but scream. Scream until her throats splits apart from it, until blood erupts from her mouth, until the whole fucking world breaks apart around her, shattered into a million pieces, just like she is on the inside. She closes her eyes instead, grits her teeth, waits until she returns to something approaching calm. She has to be quiet. She has to be smart. There may be some infected still in here, somewhere, haunting this dead place with her. She hasn’t turned, but she still doesn’t want to get eaten or mauled.

”Why haven’t I turned yet?” she whispers to herself in a voice so soft it barely carries to her own ears. “Why the fuck haven’t I _turned?_ ”

It’s not fair. Nothing is fair. Life has never been fair. She accepted that a long time ago. But this? It’s just too much.

She scratches at the bandage around her forearm, striped fabric, gray and red, dried blood showing through, crusted, old. She needs to risk a trip to the old CVS pharmacy across the plaza, down on the first floor. Alcohol. Hydrogen peroxide. Betadine. Something. The place has probably been picked clean, but it couldn’t hurt to look. She doesn’t want to die from a stupid infected wound.

Her jeans are dirty, stained with rust and blood. She has slept in them twice now. Wearing a black sports bra, she is otherwise naked from the waist up. Most of her tank top is gone, sacrificed strip by strip, to make a series of bandages for her wounded arm. She’ll stop at a clothing store first, she decides. The large J. C. Penny at the bottom of the stairs seems like a good place to start. She can see shelves and racks of clothing inside the well-lit store, electric lights burning again after years of waiting patiently. Ellie hates waiting.

The girl creeps to the top of the staircase, waits there, listening. Nothing. No infected. Just the endless hum of the escalator on the other side of the stairs. It seems safe. Ellie begins to creep down the steps.

“Attention,” a woman’s voice carries to her through broken windows, from external speakers out on the street, “The 6 a.m. shift starts in ten minutes. All drafted citizens must report for duty.”

Ellie is no longer a student at the preparatory school. Bitten now, she will never be a citizen of Boston again either. She isn’t safe here. This city is the only home she has ever known, and she isn’t welcome here any more.

“Anyone absent at roll call is in violation of the law,” the woman drones on, speaking to those who still have a right to call this quarantine zone their home.

“Fuck you,” whispers Ellie to the woman on the speaker; to the people gathering at the muster points to await the soldiers who will escort them to their work detail; to the students in her old school, familiar faces she will never see again; to the whole city itself. Fuck them. Fuck all of them.

She knows life isn’t fair, but she’s angry all the same.

Somewhere below, at the far end of the plaza, a heavy door is kicked open. The dull thump reverberates through the empty mall. Voices are heard, muffled, distant, indistinct. A few seconds later, the electric lights in the mall go out. Ten feet away, the escalator grinds down to stop. In the half-light of morning, her eyes adjust quickly. The place is now deathly still. A tomb.

“How the fuck should I know, Sergeant?” she hears a man say, almost too far away to make out the words clearly. “I don’t know who turned it on. Your guess is as good as mine.”

Someone answers, harsh, more barking than speaking, unaccustomed to hearing anything but quick compliance. She can’t make out the words. Something like ‘watch your mouth’ maybe. Her switchblade is in her hand now.

“Captain’s gonna call in for a sit-rep soon. Should we look around?” asks another. A higher voice. A woman, probably.

The voices are closer than they were before, somewhere in the heavy shadows below, at the far end, somewhere by the food court maybe.

Soldiers. Soldiers looking to kill infected. Infected like her.

A button. A thumb. The knife blade springs out, sharp and ready, for all the good it will do the girl against the soldiers and their guns.

“Shit,” Ellie mutters, crouching low, hiding from people she can’t see. She works her way back up the stairs, slowly, eyes wary, moving away from the unseen soldiers. She prays, knowing it is useless, but not wanting to die in her stupid bra in this stupid mall. Is it too much to ask to find a shirt to wear before the army puts her down?

 

* * *

 

The rain wasn’t coming down all that hard, but riding into it at twenty miles per hour made it seem like the torrential downpours that often drove across Boston in withering sheets that forced everyone indoors.

Everyone sensible, at any rate.

_What the fuck are we doing out in this shit?_

Ellie huddled on the back of the Honda, miserable inside her poncho, her hands cold (numb fingers grasping the straps of Joel’s backpack), her chest cold (the thin poncho pressed tightly against her, offering no warmth), her legs cold (denim unprotected by the poncho, saturated and dark from the driving rain), her feet cold (canvas basketball shoes soaked through to ten toes, each one aching). Inside the confines of her helmet, her face was warm, but her breath was slowly fogging the visor up. Before today, the helmet had seemed hot, unpleasant. She wouldn’t have worn it at all except Joel had insisted. Today it was a welcome presence.

The camo-patterned plastic of the poncho was cinched tightly around her waist with the green nylon drawstring. Below the cord, the edges of the poncho flapped frantically behind her, casting off the rain water in a wild spray of droplets spiraling in the bike’s wake, quickly lost amid all the other fat, wet drops surging and tumbling behind the big, red Honda.

Joel was pushing hard down this road. After days of barely passable asphalt, here at last was blacktop that was in reasonably good shape. They had turned west onto this road at the junction of highway 33 and route 47 as they sped through the bombed out ruins of some town called Bellefontaine. It had carried them all the way to a spooky ghost town of a place called Union City and the state line. They were on route 28 now. Ohio was behind them now. Ellie was in Indiana. Another new frontier for a girl who had never seriously expected to leave Boston in her lifetime.

They’d lost most of a day searching for a map of this state in a little town called Ridgeville. People had been there, hiding in the shadows. Not many, but she was sure they were actual people and not stalkers. She had glimpsed them, darting about behind windows and open doors, never attacking, always watching. Maybe a dozen survivors, give or take. Not hunters, just people. Scared, like her. Joel had made her stay with the Honda as he searched every gas station they rode past. He had told her to stay low and kill anyone who approached her and the bike, but no one did and she was grateful for that. When he’d finally found a map, they hauled ass out of town and Ellie still wasn’t sure how she felt about the place. Maybe the people there would have been friendly if they weren’t so scared of strangers. But maybe they would have killed her for her shoes if only they’d been a little braver. She remembered the piles of shoes in that dark, smelly room in Pittsburgh and shuddered.

They’d spent the night a few miles away from the place, hidden in the dense green shelter of a big, overgrown recreation area just off the main road. When they had hit the blacktop this morning, the storm clouds were ahead of them, dark and foreboding, but the road was smooth. Joel had actually smiled. After a mile or so of easy travel and good blacktop beneath their turning wheels, he had reached back and slapped her knee. “Hot damn, Ellie!” he had exclaimed, “If it stays like this, we’ll reach Jackson in no time!” She had smiled, nodded, feigned enthusiasm, and used the concealment of her helmet to pray for broken road ahead. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to find Joel’s brother and the Firefly’s secret quarantine zone… she just didn’t want to find it too soon. She wanted to help, to provide the cure that Marlene was so certain she possessed, to make Riley’s and the brothers’ deaths mean something, but Joel was the first adult to take an interest in her as a person. He was treating her more and more like a friend every day. Her best friend was gone; Marlene might very well be dead and if she wasn’t, she would never really have much use for Ellie beyond the obligation she felt towards the girl due to her friendship with Ellie’s dead mother.

No, gruff and grumpy Joel was all Ellie had now and she was in no rush to let him go.

_Back in Boston, when we found those garden gnomes, Joel said he was going to get me to Tommy and his brother could take me the rest of the way. That was the plan. But things have changed. We’re friends now. That’s changed. So the plan’s changed too, right?_

_It’s changed. It has to be changed. He won’t ditch me. Not after what we’ve been through. I’m not just cargo anymore._

_I can’t be._

_I’m not cargo. I’m his friend._

They’d put a good thirty or forty miles behind them before they finally drove into the storm. Now they were moving at a crawl, barely able to see as the storm worsened, hoping at first that the storm would blow itself out quickly, hoping now that they could find a safe, dry place to hunker and wait for the sunshine to return. The city of Muncie had sounded promising to her, but Joel had skirted around it, opting to push on for a smaller city of Alexandria instead. Joel distrusted larger places. Almost always picked clean, he had said, and too many places for trouble to hide. Smaller towns were better than big cities, safer. Ellie had shrugged. He was the one with the wet head; she had still been somewhat dry inside her poncho at the time. But that was miles of road and gallons of water ago. She was soaked everywhere the poncho and helmet didn’t cover and the moisture was starting to wick its way underneath the shielding plastic now. She should be miserable, she knew. But she smiled instead. They were barely moving now.

_Get there in no time, huh? Ha! You’re not getting away from me that easy, Joel Miller._

She tucked herself in tightly behind him, ostensibly to keep more of the rain off herself. But secretly she wanted to feel the warmth coming off his body. She was cold and being so close to him was comforting in many ways.

_Let’s find somewhere dry… and get out of these wet clothes… and then we can snuggle up in your sleeping bag… naked… and do whatever we have to do to stay warm._

Ellie smiled again. This was a good plan. So good, in fact, that thinking about it in ever greater detail helped drive the chill from her body. She had never done that with a man before, but she wanted to do it with Joel. She wanted Joel to be her first. She wanted him to teach her all about that stuff.

_Teach me, Joel. You teach me all kinds of stuff. Teach me about that too._

They were approaching another small town. Alexandria, the rusted, fading sign said. Ahead, a gas station emerged from the gloom, a Shell station similar to the one where they had found Kristi Chau and this Gold Wing in West Virginia almost two weeks ago. Joel slowed the old motorcycle down a little, doing a rolling inspection of the place as they approached. The windows were intact, the doors closed. Ellie’s spirits began to rise at the thought of a warm, dry refuge from this miserable rain. Her loins began to warm at the thought of two bodies nestled close together inside the romantic confines of a shared sleeping bag.

_I want you to undress me, Joel. I want you to see me._

“Sonuvabitch,” Joel muttered, loud enough to carry over the sound of the rain and the engine.

The thick fog of cordyceps hung suspended in the air behind the intact glass of the station’s front windows. The outlines of a fungal garden could just be made out through the spore fog inside.

“Son of a bitch,” Ellie groused, the damp air and sudden disappointment leeching away the newly kindled warmth in her belly.

Joel twisted the throttle and they put the old Shell station behind them. This whole town would prove to be filled with nothing but infected and rusted cars. No safe haven here. Only the speed and maneuverability of the bike would see them through that mess.

 

* * *

 

The telephone poles had once connected the whole country. Miles and miles of thick wires, suspended from pole to pole, never touching the ground, connecting every house to every other house. Green eyes wide behind the fogged visor, Ellie marveled at the thought of it.

_You could call anyone. Anywhere. Any time you wanted. Even after curfew. Did they have curfew back then? I don’t think they did._

_Fuck! You could just do what you wanted and call whoever you wanted and you didn’t need anybody’s permission. Everyone had a phone. Their own fucking phone. Man!_

Ellie didn’t understand the difference between landlines and cell phones. There were no functioning satellite networks anymore. The last ones had begun to falter and fail before she turned ten. Most had been off-line since she was a little girl; the few that remained these last years had been reserved for government use. But now those were gone too. Beyond a few short wave radios here and there, every city was almost entirely isolated now. Every city, every man, for himself. Every girl too.

All the phones in Boston were landlines, and all the numbers were local ones. They were a luxury, a privilege. Each apartment building had a single, communal phone and use of it was strictly rationed. Ellie would have had a hard time believing that in Joel’s time, landlines were considered old-fashioned and outmoded. Satellites, GPS, wireless networks. These things are the stuff of science fiction again, no more real than Atlantis, the artifacts of a lost world and a vanished people.

She felt the bike slowing down again. She peeked around Joel’s large shoulders, hoping to see a Motel 6. Heavy doors. Thick curtains. Soft beds. Blankets. Towels. Safety. Bonding. Wine coolers. The Motel 6 outside of Zanesville, Ohio would forever hold a special place in her heart.

She looked. No motel. No building of any kind.

It was an intersection, an asphalt ‘+’ where one road crossed another. A faded stop sign warned of the intersection. Another warned to watch for ice on the bridge ahead. A few ramshackle farmhouses down the road kept watch over giant fields long neglected and teeming with a wild assortment of crops that no one would ever harvest.

Off the main route, a small two-lane road meandered off into the woods. A sign indicated that the Lily Creek was somewhere up ahead and the town of Orestes was just beyond that.

_There’s a bridge? Must be on the other side of those trees._

“We going into town?” she asked, her voice loud and strange to her ears inside the confinement of the helmet.

Joel pointed to his left, towards the side road. She peered around his shoulder again, following his finger along the blacktop that led off into the woods and the untended farmland. Over there, maybe seventy yards away, was a black SUV, resting in the grass. An unmoving form lay in the grass at the edge of the road, only a few feet from the open door of the vehicle. The SUV wasn’t rusted. It was mostly clean. It hadn’t been here long. A few days maybe? A carefully painted Firefly logo was emblazoned on the driver’s open door.

There is no sound but that of the Honda’s idling engine and the falling rain.

“What about it, Ellie?” Joel asked, turning his head to look back at her. “Think maybe we should check it out?”

She realized that he was testing her. He’d been doing this more and more lately. Asking her opinion on things, not because he didn’t know what to do, but because he wanted to see if she did. She did her best to puzzle it out quickly.

_Probably not an ambush. Not in the rain. And nobody could’ve known we were coming, right? The wreck isn’t rusting, but it isn’t smoking either. It’s new, but not that new. And there’s no sign of anyone. The grass isn’t flattened anywhere, so nobody ran for it when they heard us coming. Maybe it’s safe? It’s probably safe. I think it’s safe._

“Sure,” she said. “Doesn’t look like there’s anyone around. And that guy looks pretty dead to me. Couldn’t hurt to look, right? Maybe we’ll find a clue where the Fireflies are.”

He nodded, smiled. She smiled back. She was still smiling when he levered the bike’s transmission to first gear and eased the throttle open just enough to approach the SUV at a slow, cautious pace. She had passed the test. She hated when other people tested her, like she was a dumb kid that didn’t know anything. But she liked Joel’s tests. The tests were one of his ways of teaching her.

_I make a good sidekick, Joel. Admit it._

As they drew closer to the wreck, Ellie could see dull brass dotting the blacktop. Empty shell casings, scattered here and there, both sprayed out in long arcs and dumped in tight little clusters, lying wherever the firearms that had spat them out had left them deposited. Many had rolled across the hard surface and come to rest in long, lumpy rows at the base of the grass growing at the edges of the roadside. Bullet holes dotted the truck, maybe a hundred of them.

“Firefight,” she said.

“Yeah,” Joel agreed. “Army, maybe. That Tahoe’s been shot all to hell.”

“Tahoe?”

“That truck up there. It’s a Chevy Tahoe.”

“Gotcha.”

The SUV was riddled with the perfect little round strikes of bullets. Most of the glass had been shot out. One of the tires was flat, punctured by a bullet. Every one of the windows was covered with rusting metal bars, welded together in a tight tic-tac-toe grid from corner to corner and fitted to the vehicle securely. Ellie would have a hard time getting more than one hand through the gaps between the bars.

_To keep infected from reaching in. Smart._

_Too bad it wasn’t bullet proof._

With a short, soft squeal of its brake pads, the big Honda came to a stop. Joel eased the kickstand down while Ellie climbed down. Her shotgun was wrapped up inside a small white trash bag. She loosened the plastic bundle, in case she needed to get the gun out quickly. Joel was beside her now, his .45 in hand.

“You’re not gonna shut the engine off?” she asked, flipping up her visor.

“Don’t plan on stayin’ long,” he said, his eyes on the black SUV and the dead man beside it. “Besides, that battery ain’t too healthy. Don’t wanna have to crank the engine any more than I have to.”

“Oh. Okay.” Her voice was firm, but her stomach was suddenly wobbling about inside her body. The thought of the red motorcycle never starting again was an unpleasant one.

_It’d be a long fucking walk to Wyoming, I bet._

“C’mon, let’s check it out. Quick now, alright?” he asked, his left hand on her shoulder.

“Quick, boss,” she smiled and stayed close to his side as they crossed the ten feet from the waiting Honda to the abandoned Chevy.

“Be careful,” he says from the hood of the truck. “Don’t flip that body over. It might be booby-trapped.”

“Oh yeah? Damn,” she says, stepping carefully around the dead man.

“Yeah. Sometimes they’ll leave a grenade underneath with the pin pulled. That way when the next guy to come along checks the body, Boom!”

“Fuck.” She had never heard of such a thing.

Ellie flipped the visor of the helmet up and the cool, moist air around her was pleasantly cool on her freckled cheeks. Joel on the other hand, looked like a drowned rat. His hair was matted down and his shooter’s glasses with their amber lenses were fogging up from the mix of the cold water and the heat of his body. Rain pattered lightly on their plastic ponchos. She squatted near the body of the dead man. The black armband with the familiar logo declared the dead man’s affiliation, in case the khaki pants and yellow-green jacket hadn’t been clear enough.

“Yep. He was a Firefly alright,” Ellie said, looking up at Joel as he lifted the unlatched hood of the vehicle.

“Figured as much from the doodles on the doors,” Joel said, his expression growing hard as he surveyed the engine compartment. “Battery’s gone. Sparkplugs too. How long’s he been dead, do you think?”

Ellie looked at the man and tried to see him as clinically as she could. The bullets that had punched through his chest and the round that had shattered thigh must have been agonizing. But he had lived through it. Long enough to crawl out of the shot up vehicle and empty his gun, a pistol judging from the handful of 9mm brass casings in the grass. The gun was gone, as was his firefly pendant. Anything of value had been taken from the body after a single 5.56mm rifle bullet had been sent rocketing into his skull. The empty rifle casing was nearby. Small bits of his skull and rotting scalp were nearby as well. The skin was greenish, and maggots could be seen working in the flesh, safe from the falling rain, warm and cozy inside the skin. She nudged his arm with her sneaker. The body was stiff.

“Two days, maybe? Three? I’m not sure.” Her voice was firm but her eyes said that she wished she had a better answer. The medical trainers in the after class program she had been taking when her life got turned upside down had only covered some of the signs of rigor mortis and stuff with her. There was still lots she didn’t know.

“Sounds about right. Pretty sure this was the army,” Joel groused, dropping the hood. “Engine block’s been trashed, hoses and wires cut. Hunter’s woulda tried to salvage it. Only the goddamn army would intentionally wreck a good truck like this.”

“Maybe that group we saw a few days ago?” she asked, gingerly stepping over the executed Firefly to peer into the cabin of the SUV.

“Maybe. Or one like it. Dunno how many patrols and scroungin’ teams Cleveland could have out here. Wouldn’t think there’d be very many. But maybe they’re doin’ better than Boston.” His brow was furrowed as he came around to the ajar passenger door to help Ellie search the interior. His head was working hard for an answer that made sense and nothing was coming to mind. “Christ, we gotta be 200 miles from Cleveland, as the crow flies. And Chicago is almost as far away. Long way from home for an army patrol, either way.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked, finding nothing of interest on the dashboard except lots of broken glass. “They don’t usually come out this far?”

“Last few years, Boston’s policy’s been ten miles tops for patrols and usually less from what we used to have to deal with smugglin’ shit in and out. Shit, even Dallas never ranged out more than fifty or sixty miles from the wall usually, unless they were lookin’ for someone,” he said. “Course, that was back in 2016, back when the damn mail was still sorta runnin’…”

His words trailed off. His thoughts had stumbled into a past best left buried. Ellie sensed this and rushed to fill the silence before it could smother this moment of bonding.

“Umm… Maybe things are better around here? Or maybe Cleveland’s got a bigger army?” Ellie offered helpfully, searching under the driver’s seat. Brass casings were scattered everywhere in here. The people inside had been shooting out through the broken windows. It must have been deafening.

“Or maybe they’re better organized or got better leaders,” Joel said, rifling through the contents of the already open, already searched glovebox. “Boston’s army never struck me as particularly adventurous. Always stuck close to home. Didn’t take too many chances. Even after all those soldiers from Vermont arrived, back in 2026, Boston still stuck to a ten or fifteen mile patrol zone around the QZ for the most part.”

“Isn’t that safer?” she asked. The keys were still in the ignition. A bright orange plastic key fob hung from the ring. She turned it over in her hand and read it.

_I wish my car retained as much gas as I do._

She smiled.

“Yeah. So long as no new neighbors move in,” he said.

Nothing in the small compartment but surprisingly current oil change records, an anti-freeze tester, a small leather bag filled with old bottle caps, and a twenty-seven year old owner’s manual for a 2006 Chevrolet Tahoe. Blood was on the passenger’s seat and smeared across the doorframe. Another Firefly had been in here during the firefight with the army. Had he been taken prisoner? Or was he lying dead or wounded somewhere nearby? Joel kept the shotgun within easy reach as he poked around. Dying men could be trigger happy under the best of circumstances.

“Neighbors,” Ellie repeated, considering the word. “You mean, like, infected?”

“Sure. Infected,” he said, hold up one of the spent 7.62mm casings that littered the floorboard. AK-47, most likely, or maybe a Ruger Mini-30. He added, almost absently, wishing the dead Firefly’s rifle hadn’t been confiscated by the victorious soldiers, “Humans too.”

“Hunters?” she ventured, inspecting the instruments set into the dashboard. Fuel gauge, speedometer, check engine light. All of them blasted into jagged plastic scrap by close range automatic rifle fire. The army had made sure this vehicle would never be of use to anyone ever again.

“Sometimes, yeah. Bandits and such.” His fingers explored the frayed ends of the wires left behind when the soldiers removed the CB radio. Someone had written ‘CH 6’ and ‘CH 37’ on the faded, cracked, burgundy vinyl of the dash with a black permanent marker. “Smugglers too. But it’s the ordinary civilians that you gotta worry about.”

“Why’s that?” she asked, stepping out into the rain briefly before returning to cabin through the back door on the driver’s side. The backseat looked no more promising than the front, but she wanted to be thorough. She adjusted the helmet on her head, water dripping from her hand. She wanted to do a good job. She also wanted to be somewhere dry.

“Shanty towns draw all kinds of trouble, Red. Easy prey for hunters,” he said, joining her in the back of the SUV. Empty brass was scattered back here too, along with shards of broken glass. The door panels and armrests were missing back here too. Old Kevlar vests had been stuffed into the exposed interiors of the doors to provide some degree of protection from bandits. Against the massed fire of an army patrol, they had quickly been reduced to ribbons. Farmer armor. That’s what Anthony had called these sorts of modifications. The quiet man had known all about that stuff, probably picked it up in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever the hell else he ad been before the outbreak. Most of the vehicles in their convoy had been rigged in a similar fashion after Anthony had joined up.

Joel blinked away memories of the crew and their days on the road and tried to focus on the young woman across from her him, body almost pressed flat against the floorboard behind the seat, her face upturned, green eyes fixed on him, eager to learn as always. He found his voice again.

“And runners are always drawn to large groups of people. A shanty town is just a mushroom farm waitin’ to happen if you’re not careful, kiddo. Like that place those people set up in the sewers. All it takes is one slip up and it’s all over.”

“Makes sense,” Ellie nodded, her fingers gently working loose a small notebook that had gotten itself stuffed into the crease between the driver’s back and bottom seat cushions. Somehow the soldiers had missed it when they searched the vehicle. She flipped through it. Lots of notes that looked promising, but it would take a while to read it all. She spoke to Joel idly as she flipped through the pages, “Did you ever live in one of those places? A shanty town?”

“Shit, kid,” Joel chuckled before ducking back out into the rain. “I used to _run_ a shanty town.”

 

* * *

 

The rain was a dull drumming on the roof of the ‘Kwik-Pick’ convenience store. Somehow, now that she was out of the elements, it was an almost cozy sound to her ears. The concrete floor of the small storeroom was cold beneath her bare feet. The old nylon broom in her hands was forcing back twenty years of neglect. In another few minutes, the corner of the sparsely appointed room would make a nice campsite for the evening. The unrelenting rain had forced them to take shelter well before sundown. She wasn’t complaining. It was nice to be dry again.

Several feet away, by the stacks of empty red milk crates, the blue nylon line that Joel had strung from the top of the empty metal shelves to the conduit line running into the walk-in freezer was festooned with her wet clothing, slowly dripping out the absorbed rain. A drain grate on the floor carried away the collecting water to who knew where.

“Tah dah,” Ellie said to the empty room, holding the broom up triumphantly, like a magician casting a spell.

This floor was clean. Or as clean as she could make it. And the big pile of empty cardboard boxes she’d found stacked up by the freezer door, once she’d broken them down and arranged them properly, had made a nice enough cushion to get them off the hard, cold floor for the night. Maybe not the most comfortable accommodations in the world, but it beat sleeping on concrete.

“Brrr,” she shivered a bit theatrically. The cool air was drafty.

She lowered the broom, reached down and tugged her shirt down just a bit. The hem of her long-sleeved, lavender Steve Miller Band shirt with the cool picture of the pegasus with rainbow wings hung just low enough to hide her panties. Barely. So long as she didn’t raise her arms too high. She had found this shirt in the ‘head shop’ in East Liberty and had kept it hidden in her backpack until now. Joel hadn’t seen her in this shirt before. He had certainly never seen her in her panties before. She couldn’t wait for his reaction. She danced a little. She giggled and her heart began to race. She thought about her gray shorts rolled up somewhere inside her backpack. Her nerves began to fail. She bit her lower lip and tried to convince herself to stick with the plan even as a increasingly loud voice in the back of her mind began to yell at her, imploring her to put the shorts on before Joel saw her in her underwear and left her standing in the rain on the side of the road while he went back to Boston alone.

_He won’t do that. We’re a team. And so what if he sees me in my undies? It’s not like I haven’t seen him in his. Shit, I’ve seen his dick._

She blushed, grinned, lowered her eyes, her mind going back to the Dixie Star Drive-In and her stolen peek during his bath time.

_Wouldn’t mind seeing that again._

Outside the storeroom, in the front of the store with its broken windows and picked clean shelves, the front door opened. A current of cold air squeezed in under the stockroom door, chilling her bare feet. She scooped up the little .32 caliber pistol from the shelf beside the stained mop sink near the pile of flattened cardboard boxes.

“Jesus Christ,” she heard a familiar voice mutter as soaked boots squished their way across the linoleum floor to the closed door of the storeroom.

Ellie put the gun down and tried to pose herself with the broom as casually as a pantsless fourteen-and-a-half-year-old girl could possibly manage.

“This is so dumb,” she told herself quietly. “He’s gonna kill me.”

_We’re a team… we’re a team… he won’t kill you… he won’t kill you…_

“It’s open,” she said brightly as he twisted the knob and let himself into the back area of the store.

Joel was soaking wet. His camouflage poncho was hanging limply from his left hand, water spilling out from it in a tiny spout as he stepped into the storeroom. The bike was hidden behind the store, the reliable tarp covering it, old milk crates stacked in front of it. The keys to the bike were safe in his pocket.

“Hey,” she said, raising one hand in a small wave, acting friendly, feeling naked, faking bravery.

Joel looked at her for a long, silent minute. She blushed, though she tried not to.

“Clothes were wet,” she offered with a weak smile, as though she didn’t have dry clothes inside her backpack, as though her legs weren’t incredibly, inescapably bare. With the hand not holding the broom, she gestured towards the swept floor and the cardboard mattress. “Got a nice spot for camp all set up.”

Joel stood there in silence. Ellie shifted about uneasily, placing one foot over the other, holding onto the broom with both hands, regretting every poor life choice she had ever made that had brought her to this awkward moment.

“Never a huge fan of Steve Miller,” Joel said, seemingly nonplussed, resuming his journey across the room to the clothesline, Ellie smiling widely behind him. “This woman I used to run with, Cassie, she liked him a lot. She loved that 70s stuff. Played it all the time. I was kinda glad when the power finally went out for good in Texas just so I didn’t have to listen to ‘Fly Like An Eagle’ one more time. … Course, then the air conditioning was gone too. Kind of a wash, I guess.”

Joel began to undress and Ellie felt her throat tighten as she tried to speak. Distracted as she was, she still knew she had to pick her words with care. The past was a tricky subject with Joel.

“This… umm… back when you were… uhhh… the mayor of Shanty Town?”

“Yep,” he said, draping his gold plaid shirt over the line.

She drank him in. He continued speaking as he pulled his black t-shirt over his head.

“Little town called LaGrange, south of the old Dallas QZ.” The wet skin of his broad back glistened in the waning light filtering in through the small window set high in the wall. “Well, to be honest, this was only a year after the outbreak, so the Dallas QZ wasn’t even up and running yet. It was still a triage center with a big military safe zone. The Texas Uprising had been put down the summer before, but we were all still being punished by FEDRA. Texas and Nevada were pretty much the last states to get quarantine zones.”

“Uh huh,” Ellie said helpfully, breathlessly, watching him unbuckle his belt and unzip his denim jeans.

_Are you there, God? It’s me, Ellie. I’m totally willing to cut a deal with you right now. Please don’t turn out to be a gyp like Santa was. Help a girl out, okay? You too, Buddha. Totally willing to switch to your team if that’s what it takes._

“FEDRA had replaced FEMA, yeah? But the power grid was still on across most of the state. The juice hadn’t been declared property of the Houston and Dallas QZs just yet.”

“Oh yeah?” Ellie said, trying to listen as much as look. Joel knew about the history that her instructors never spoke about. The real history, as Riley had called it. The history Winston had told them about some nights, when Riley had brought him the good booze and he was in a talkative mood.

Joel stepped out of his soaked jeans.

_Holy shit, that man can fill out a pair of underwear._

“Good to get out of these wet clothes,” Joel said.

“Uh huh!” Ellie nodded enthusiastically.

_Thank you, Jesus. Or Buddha. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, whoever’s up there._

**. . .**  


“So you said shanty towns attract lots of stragglers?”

“Yeah. Pretty much any halfway safe place’ll draw ‘em like flies.”

The smell of sliced Vienna sausages wafted aromatically, sizzling in the aluminum pan resting on the wire frame rack arranged over the compact multi-fuel camp stove. Joel pushed at the pieces of meat with a fork. Ellie busied herself with stirring the contents of a can of sliced carrots into a bowl of warm, sliced potatoes cradled in a thick hand towel with the Motel 6 logo emblazoned on it. The carrots were in one of those small, half-sized cans. Not enough to share between two people, but just enough to add to another can of veggies to give it a little variety. Joel had just removed the bowl of canned spuds from the heat and passed it to Ellie as she asked the question. His answer, coming as he began to cook the sliced little sausages, wasn’t as informative as she would have liked. But that’s how it was with Joel. He seemed happy enough to talk to her lately, but getting more than a few words out of him at a time was a chore. She smiled, stirred, and dared to press on.

“So did you have lots of people beating down the doors to become citizens of Millerville?”

“Millerville?” he chuckled, a low, rumbling sound that sent thrills up her bare thighs.

She smiled warmly. She loved making him laugh and was always looking for new ways to do it. Her nipples were had rocks, twin points pressed against the fabric of her lavender shirt. She bit her lip and hoped he noticed. “Figured you changed the name. I would. ‘Ellieburg’ has a nice ring to it, you know?”

“Nah. Couldn’t do that to ZZ Top,” he chuckled. Ellie did too, though the joke was completely lost on her. “Jerry and Cassie would’ve killed me. So I left it La Grange.”

“All right then,” Ellie grinned, stirring the mix in the bowl. Her stomach growled. She giggled. “So how many people showed up at La Grange wanting you to be their mayor?”

“A few. Never was too happy about it. More mouths to feed. More then we had enough food for, I reckon. So most of ‘em, we just turned away. But a couple of them worked out alright. This one kid, Anthony, he was a keeper. Former army, from just before the outbreak. Hard core. Combat vet. Nothin’ rattled that guy. Had a big, black GMC Yukon full of guns and ammo and stuff. Never said where he got it. I never asked.”

“What happened to him?”

“Died.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Good guy. Ran with my crew for damn near ten years, from Texas all the way to the east coast,” Joel said, trying to remember the good years with Anthony and not the bitter day when it had ended. “Good guy. He’s the one who told me about leaving grenades under dead bodies.”

“Wish I knew stuff like that,” she offered but he said nothing in reply.

Ellie stirred the bowl of potatoes and carrots. It was as mixed as any bowl of food could be, but she continued to stir it all the same. Joel remained silent for a while. She didn’t let it bother her. That’s just how it was with him sometimes. He would talk again, sooner or later. She just had to wait.

 **. . .**  


The other Firefly had been face down in the tall grass at the far edge of the road. Two bullets had been put into the back of his head. An unnecessary gesture. The number of bullets that had already been put into his gut and legs before he crawled his way towards the concealment of the grass during the firefight had been more than enough to kill him provided the army had let things run their course. But that wasn’t how the army did things. The man had had a duffel bag. He had dragged it along with him as he pulled himself across the asphalt by his arms. Whatever had been in the bag had been taken by the soldiers. Everything of value had been taken, or course. His weapon, his dog tag, the canteen in his belt pouch. The only thing the soldiers had missed was a small, stainless steel set of fingernail clippers hiding at the bottom of one of the pockets of his cargo pants. Ellie had cleaned them up and wiped then down thoroughly with an alcohol-soaked rag. She admired them in the last rays of the almost-gone light seeping in from the small window above.

_Now I don’t have to chew ‘em. Sweet._

“Whatcha got there, Red?” Joel asked, trying to push the last of the sliced carrots into a pile before spearing them with the fork. A red apple rested on the cardboard by his hip. Ellie had already eaten hers. Nothing but the core was left. Gnawed it like a bone, Joel had teased her.

“Clippers. Found them on one of the Fireflies. Good timing. My nails were about to get a good chewing before I found these. You can borrow them if you want.”

“Which one? The one by the truck? Or the one in the grass?” He scratched the hair on his bare chest. He wore only his old sweatpants. Ellie forced herself not to stare at him.

“Grass.”

Joel was silent again. Ellie began to cut her nails. It was getting dark outside. The LED camp light hadn’t been charged during their ride because of the rain. They would have to break out one of their precious glow sticks, yet another useful item they had found in the nameless dead woman’s supply stash in Johnstown.

We only have six of the things, Joel thought. I hate to use them, but with this weather it will get too dark to see way before we’re tired enough for sleep. Not safe to be alone in the dark with that girl on a rainy night like this. Not when I can’t stop sneaking looks at her damn panties. Good God, that girl’s got one sweet little mound down there.

No bra. Hard nipples jutting out from beneath her silly shirt. Shapely, bare legs. Red hair hanging loosely down her back. That long neck. That pretty face. Those plump lips. Those adoring eyes. That sumptuous little feminine mound wrapped tight in white cotton, beckoning him from between her smooth thighs.

Oh God, Ellie. I want to fuck you so bad.

His mind began to explore that notion and he struggled with getting his train of though onto a different track. Minutes passed before he succeeded in thinking about anything other than Ellie naked and warm in his arms. His raised knee hid his erection behind his big thigh, but it would be a while before he dared to stand up.

He knew he was tired. That town they’d driven through the day before was home to people who watched them from windows and shadows but didn’t come out into the light. He and Ellie had spent the night in forest a few miles from the town. He made no campfire that night and slept with one eye open. People like that could be braver at night. He didn’t sleep much, waiting for an attack that never came. He wasn’t thinking clearly this evening and he knew it. His lust for this too-young teenager was almost as intense as it had been that night at the Motel 6 back in Zanesville. He grimaced and tried to think of anything else but her, naked and needing him.

She was almost done trimming her fingernails when Joel spoke up again, his eyes on his plate, eating slowly as he sometimes did when there was time to kill.

“Used to have a truck just like that one, Ellie. Different color. White with green stripes. Red and blue cop lights on top. Belonged to a U.S. Park Ranger named Cody Pascoe, an Okie we met in Ardmore.”

“‘We’? You and Tommy?”

“Me and Tommy and the crew we used to run with.”

“Before or after La Grange?”

“After,” Joel said, putting his empty plate down. The small storeroom was almost dark. The door was barricaded shut. The Honda was out back, hidden beneath the tarp. The rain was barely falling now. “Must’ve been… oh, two or three years after La Grange. We settled in on the bank of this big lake, an old state park. Cody had worked there. Before.”

“Yeah? Like that lake community we saw in Ohio? Right after we found the bike?”

“Something like that. Not as nice or as big. But it wasn’t bad.” His erection finally gone, Joel gathered his mess kit and took it to the sink to wash it out with his water bottle.

“Nicer than La Grange?” she asked. Her mess kit was already clean and back in her pack. Ellie was a fast eater. She pulled one foot close, securing it on top of her thigh, and began to trim her toenails too.

“Not really. Oklahoma’s a poor substitute for Texas. But that lake was nice. Plenty of fresh water. Deep and clear. Didn’t have to drive a few miles to Lake Fayette to fill the barrels like we did in La Grange. Didn’t trust the Colorado River that ran through town. Dead bodies were always showin’ up in it, just floatin’ along. Big chemical spills too sometimes, from God knows what. Half the time, that water was either full of bodies, or covered in some kind of oil slick, or it was some weird, fucked up color. Probably something they were doing in Austin. But who knows. Fuck, I remember a few times when the damn river was on fire. Flames two or three feet high once. Burned all day and most of the night that time. Shit. What a mess everything was back then.”

He poured water from his canteen, one of the pair of sturdy canteens they’d picked up in Johnstown – what a godsend that dead woman had been! – into his big water bottle to top it off. He cracked a glow stick and shook it, tying it to the bottle with some old, ratty twine he kept in his pack. The small water lamp he created bathed the room in pale green light. It made the place a little spooky to Ellie’s eyes.

“Jeez Louise. The river was on _fire?_ Fuck! That’s crazy, man. How long were you in Oklahoma with shit like that going on?” Ellie asked innocently as a nail clipping sailed into the deep shadows of the corner of the room. She wanted to keep things light. She wanted him to tell her more about himself. She didn’t want him to go quiet again.

“Not long. We were in Ardmore just a few months. We spent Christmas in Oklahoma City after that. ‘Bout three years after the outbreak, I think it was. Then we moved to this little town in Arkansas for a few years. Oklahoma was just too damn dangerous.”

“Oklahoma City?” she said, looking up at him inquisitively as he returned to his spot on the pile of cardboard and sat down with a grunt. “Didn’t you say that the airport there was filled with cordyceps? Like a big, foggy forest of the stuff?”

“I sure did. Good memory, kiddo,” he said, suddenly smiling, putting his folded up mess kit back into his pack. She grinned at the compliment as he continued. His smile fell away as he spoke. “All these big windows, floor to ceiling, and none of ‘em broken, which still blows my damn mind. Must’ve been plexiglass or something. Like a giant greenhouse in there, sorta. And inside you could see the columns of fungus growing up from the floor and down from the ceiling… like trees, almost. Buncha people holed up in there at some point, I guess, and then the infection broke out inside the place. Guess nobody got out. Spores so thick it was like a fog…”

“Wow. Creepy,” she said, trying to picture it. She shivered.

“Yeah, it was. We just stood there, lookin’ at it, me and Brian… or was it Dave? I didn’t know half the time. They were twins, yeah? Brian and Dave Heller.”

“Really? Twins? Cool.”

“Yeah. Good guys. They joined up in… Haskell, I think it was. Back when we were still in Texas. Back in… oh, Jesus… 2016? ‘17? Hell if I can remember,” he shrugged, adding with a sigh, “Long time ago.”

“Are they gone too?” she asked, hoping he wouldn’t go silent again, but desperate to know more about this man across from her.

He sighed and didn’t say anything for a long moment. She didn’t speak, but didn’t look away either. If she broke eye contact and went back to clipping her toenails, she was certain he’d use it as an excuse to change the subject or simply not talk anymore.

“Yeah… They died… lemme see… it was after Sikeston…” Joel stared up at the small window set high in the wall, tiny and elevated enough to discourage burglars. The heavy layer of clouds outside was stretching out the half-light period of dusk. His eyes were soft, unfocused, a lifetime away from her. He looked sad. She wanted to hug him. “Bowling Green. Yeah, that’s right. Kentucky. Summer of… ’23, probably. We were looking to make a new camp. Got hit just after sundown by a band of hunters… locals… more of them than us. Dave caught a round in the neck. He was dyin’. No savin’ him. Lisa said he was a goner. Shit, didn’t need to be a paramedic to know that. You could tell just by lookin’ at him. But Brian ran out to get him. Didn’t want to give up on him. Or maybe he just didn’t want him dyin’ all alone out in the middle of the field like that… I don’t know… Like I said, they were brothers. They came into this world together. Left it the same way.”

Joel turned his attention to the laundry hanging on the blue nylon line. Not dripping. But not dry either. Maybe by morning it would be dry. Their guns were oiled and cleaned, laid out on the manager’s old desk, saved from the rain and free of water now. He would have to teach Ellie how to clean her guns soon. It was something she needed to learn.

We were miles out of Bowling Green by morning, he suddenly remembered, the thought intruding into his mind. Kentucky. Early summer. Hot. Humid. Too many people packed into too few vehicles and not a one of them with a working air conditioner. Not as many of us as we’d been when we rolled into Memphis, but still a lot of us. And hard as nails. Harder than those damn hunters were expecting, that’s for sure. We killed way more of theirs than they killed of ours. But there were just so damn many of them. Must have killed more than twenty of the fuckers before they finally fell back long enough for us to pull out in the trucks that still ran. Christ, we left so much behind that night.

Ellie watched him closely, while doing her best to appear as though she wasn’t.

_Where are you, Joel? How bad is it back there in your memories? You can talk to me. I’ll listen._

Joel sighed deeply. They’d lost more than the Heller twins in Bowling Green. A good part of the convoy had been shot out from under them as well. The U-Haul truck with the Alamo painted on the side, full of precious supplies that they could barter in any town. Two pickup trucks. Two motorcycles, Tommy’s and Big Matt’s. Doc Montalvo’s RV. He’d been dead for five or six years by then, killed by Anthony back in Haskell. But that battered, white and beige Fleetwood had served as their kitchen, shower, bathroom, and executive office since the old professor and his pretty young student had joined the crew in Houston. Hell, pretty much the only reason he’d let an old geology teacher like Montalvo into the crew was to get that RV. Later, after a few years had gone by, Joel had become the sort of man who would probably have just taken it from the old man at gunpoint. But back in Houston, there was still something of the good man he had been left inside him. That man was long gone now, but back then… he wasn’t so far gone back then… He wondered when the change had happened, when he turned into this man he was now. Oklahoma City? When he killed Landeros and lied to Tommy about it? Memphis? When he lost so many of his crew as that QZ burned to the ground? Clarksville? When poor Lisa, covered in burn scars, finally gave up hope and killed herself?

Or was it Bastrop? The little town outside of Austin where he’d raised his daughter? The same daughter he’d carried right up to the man that had killed her?

His large, calloused hand idly rubbed the broken watch on his wrist. Ellie noticed. He did this sometimes. She didn’t know why but she wanted to ask. She knew she shouldn’t, but she still wanted to ask. She put the clippers away and took a sip from her canteen.

“Cody died in Memphis,” he said idly, as though talking to himself. “But we hung on to that Tahoe of his for another couple of years. Transmission finally locked up and we had to leave it behind in… umm… Mullins, Georgia… I think it was. Shit… That was… ten years ago, I guess?”

He didn’t tell her that Mullins was where they’d left Phil behind too, bleeding and wailing on the side of the road, shot by Vic for molesting a little girl the quiet creep had found hiding in the ruins of an old K-Mart. Joel kept that to himself. Ellie didn’t need to know about that.

Fuck, he thought, she probably doesn’t need to know about any of this. Why the hell am I still talking? I need to shut up. Maybe I oughta just go back to thinking about her sweet little pussy some more and keep all this shit to myself like I always do.

“Ten years ago? Back when you used to be a hunter?” Ellie asked, regretting the last word as soon as it slipped from her mouth.

Joel’s brows knitted together. The knuckles of the hand covering his watch went white.

“…Yeah.” A word he didn’t want to say. A word he only barely said.

She dug a stubborn sliver of apple peel from between her teeth with an ironically almost-too-short fingernail while she worked up the nerve to ask her next question.

“Does it ever bother you, Joel? The stuff you did back then?”

“No point in lettin’ it bother me,” he said, lying back to stare up at the corrugated metal ceiling and the long-dead fluorescent lights. His erection was gone now. His apple, the last of the ones they’d collected from that overgrown orchard they’d spent the night in as they’d made their way out of Ohio, would go uneaten tonight. “Can’t change the past, Ellie.”

_That’s not what I asked._

A long, disappointed breath slipped from her nostrils. She got up to brush her teeth. As she crossed the room, the Ziploc sandwich baggie with the toothbrush and little box of baking soda in one hand, her canteen in the other, she had forgotten all about her bare legs. So had Joel.

_Can’t talk about Tess. Can’t talk about Sam and Henry. But sometimes you’ll talk about this stuff. What’s the difference, Joel?_

_Some stuff is too recent, I guess. Old stuff is safer to think about, maybe?_

She remembered the day at the Dixie Star Drive-In when he told her about the good times with Tommy. She wanted more stories like that. She poured a little water on her toothbrush and dipped it into the box of Arm & Hammer. She’d taken this box from the luggage they’d found in the Motel 6. She remembered the woman they’d met there. Tala. Ellie remembered how pretty Tala was. She wondered if the woman was okay. Tala was probably the only survivor of her little community. She had to be lonely, right? Ellie hated being alone. She thought of the dead woman in Johnstown, the building with the funny signs on the boarded up doors and the big stash of supplies so carefully organized inside. Ellie had found her poncho and canteen in that supply room. The woman hadn’t needed stuff like that anymore – she’d shot herself in the head years before Ellie came along. The woman had died alone, safe and starving, inside the cozy little fortress she’d made out of a Marathon gas station.

_I’m glad you’re here, Joel. Even if you are a moody old fart sometimes._

Joel was thinking about Cody’s white and green Chevy Tahoe and that big lake in Ardmore with the hidden, peaceful little community that sprung up along the tranquil shoreline. He remembered how he and his crew had rolled in and taken over the makeshift town one fine September afternoon. He remembered how the people had howled in protest when he and his and shown up with the guns and the new rules. And he remembered how those same folks had begged him and his crew and their guns to stay when his convoy had rolled out a few months later, taking most of the supplies with them. Taking Cody too, the guy who had been more or less leading those people since the outbreak until Joel showed up. Cody had never wanted to be a leader, wasn’t much good at it. He was tired, ready to let somebody else make the decisions. He was happy to come with, even if it meant leaving the rest of those poor fuckers on foot with a mile-long horde of infected slowly working their way north from Forth Worth, like plague of locusts or something, barely pushed aside by the determined guns of the Dallas Battalion. A writhing, jerking mass of corrupted flesh driven by the inhuman needs of the alien fungus rooted deeply into the folds of their brains. It was easy for Ellie to judge. She hadn’t seen what he’d seen. As bad as it was for her, she didn’t know what it had been like in those first few years. Dire. Scarring. Unforgettable. Biblical, end of days, Book of Revelations kind of shit. Godawful stuff. Stuff you couldn’t ever forget. Stuff you could still see when you closed your eyes more than a decade later.

He had seen Cody exploded into a dozen pieces, his body bursting into tatters from a hideous barrage of big 25mm rounds fired from the turret of a Bradley IFV. Cody and Enzo were both ripped apart by that autocannon, chopped into bloody chunks that flew twenty feet in every direction, painting the cinderblock wall and the surrounding parking lot of that old Kroger’s grocery store with their blood.

She can’t even imagine, he thought to himself. She’s got no idea about the bargains you had to make, the fast-talking you had to do. The compromises we made with ourselves and each other. The deals we stitched together over dead bodies. The blood we spilled when we broke the deals because there wasn’t no other choice sometimes. She don’t know the guilt. The goddamn guilt you have to carry around after shit like that. She don’t know anything about it and thank God for that.

He dug through his pack to find his own toothbrush before joining her. She smiled at him with foamy teeth and happily made room at the edge of the stained sink. He tried not to stand too close but it wasn’t easy. The sink was small and she slowly inched her way closer to him as they cleaned their teeth. The warmth of their almost too close bodies mingled together and they both drew strength from it secretly.

 

* * *

 

This place was a kitchen or something, back before the outbreak. Maybe a restaurant? Or a cafeteria? Ellie doesn’t know enough about how the world used to be to be sure. She knows that people used to eat at places other than mess halls. They had restaurants and bars and all kinds of things. This place seems like one of those, but who the hell knows.

She sits on the edge of a long table and scratches at her forearm, at the bite hidden beneath a bandage and the sleeve of her red thermal shirt. She remembers that there is a Firefly guard standing watch by the door and realizes that maybe she shouldn’t draw any attention to that arm. She tugs at the collar of the white t-shirt she’s wearing over the thermal. She found it in the mall along with a few others. It reads ‘Living The Dream’ across the front. She wishes she had picked another one before seeking out the Fireflies. Her fingers twist together in her lap. She knows she has to handle this just right or she’s going to get a bullet in the head. She takes a deep breath. She’s taken a lot of those lately.

The guard watches as she slides down from the table and begins to dig through her backpack.

“What the hell are you doing, kid?” he asks, watching her with dismissive contempt.

Phillip Liu has only been with the Fireflies a few months and he’s eager to prove himself, so he’s especially not happy about babysitting some smart mouth brat, but his sergeant knew this kid on sight when they ran across her in one of the smuggler’s tunnels under the city an hour ago. Sarge ordered him to watch her until he returned with Marlene. It’s a shit job, but you don’t cross Marlene. She’s the biggest Firefly in Boston, and probably the biggest Firefly on the whole east coast too. Her parents were part of the small group started the Fireflies. She was the voice of the Firefly pirate radio broadcasts out of Washington, DC when she was just a teenager. For lots of people, Marlene is the Fireflies.

“I’m getting something to drink,” Ellie grumbles, not even bothering to look at him. He’s been a dick to her since that other Firefly dropped her off here. “Is that okay or do I have to salute you first, Corporal Dick Cheese?”

“What have you got in there?” he asks, walking towards her, craning his neck to peer into her pack.

She closes it up quickly, a can of Cherry Pepsi in her hand.

“Gimme that,” he says, reaching for the can.

“Fuck you!” she snaps, trying to pull it away from him. “Get your own!”

“I just did,” he smirks, easily pulling the can from her small hand. “And you got another one in there. I saw it. So what are you complaining about, you little shit?”

She gives him the finger but he doesn’t see. His back is to her, his greedy eyes on the can’s pop-top ring as he returns to his spot by the door.

_Motherfucker. I hope you choke on it, you cock gobbler._

She grumbles and takes the other can of soda from her pack. Vanilla Coke. Her second choice. She likes vanilla but she likes cherry more. She thinks about breaking out her Walkman and listening to some music, but she doesn’t want that cockmunch by the door to help himself to more of her stuff. She wipes off the dusty can. It had been in the mall’s vending machine for twenty years before she came along to set it free.

“Best Before Jan. 2014,” she reads aloud from the bottom of the can.

“Shut up,” the guard says.

“Bite me,” the girl says.

She opens the can and drinks. Warm, not fizzy, but not rancid either. She likes it. It’s the first Vanilla Coke she’s ever had. She has no idea what it’s supposed to taste like but anything with this much sugar always tastes good. Besides, it kills her thirst and does a fair job pushing her hunger to the back of her mind. That’s all she wants from this canned drink and it delivers. She downs half the can and stops to take a deep breath.

_Just be cool, Ellie. We can do this. We don’t really know her, but Marlene knew your mom. She’ll listen to us. She will. It’s gonna be okay, boo._

From the other side of the door, she hears the voices approaching. The first is the sergeant she spoke to earlier, the one she approached in the tunnel under Charter Street. The guard chugs the last of the soda and stands tall and proud, the perfect sentry, his weapon held across his puffed-out chest at the ready.

_What a fucking tool. Brown nosing turd. I hope Marlene kicks you in the balls._

“… me and that new guy, Phil, we found her in the old tunnel over by the safe house on Hanover,” the sergeant is saying, his voice getting closer with each syllable.

The next voice belongs to Marlene. The guard by the door straightens even more at the sound of it. He’s practically at attention when she enters the room.

“Damn it, Carter. I DO NOT need this shit right now!” Marlene says as she enters, hard lines of simmering anger marring her face. Her clothes are smudged with soot. She’s been in a firefight or maybe an actual fire. With Marlene, who could say.

Ellie stops leaning on the edge of the table. She stands up straight, forcing a small smile, her green eyes worried, trying to defuse this before it gets away from her.

_She was mom’s friend. She’ll listen to me._

“Hi, Marlene,” Ellie says, raising one hand in greeting. “You’re probably wondering –“

Marlene cuts through the bullshit. She barks her words more than she speaks them.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Ellie? Why did you run away from the school? What the hell were you _thinking?_ There aren’t enough strings in this city for me to pull to get you back in there now. And where the hell is Riley Abel?”

Ellie opens her mouth to speak but Marlene isn’t done. She points a finger at Ellie as she approaches. The young girl wilts under fury of the older woman’s gaze.

“Don’t think for a minute that you’re going to convince me that she isn’t mixed up in this mess somehow, Ellie. I’ve already had to eat a big plate of shit when I told the Firefly commander in Hartford that I’d be one short on the delivery of new recruits I promised to send him. We’re about to make some real headway up there and here you come pissing all over everything right now with one of your stupid stunts. So you had better talk fast, understand?”

Marlene is only a few feet away. Close enough to reach out and slug her in the face, Ellie realizes. She gulps and holds up her hands, palms out. She keeps her eyes locked on Marlene’s while she lowers her head a little. A gesture of submission. She has to play this just right.

“I’m sorry, Marlene. I swear I am,” she says in a soft voice. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”

“Still not hearing a reason for all this shit you’ve pulled, Ellie.” Marlene’s voice is brittle.

Ellie has never seen her this pissed. Fuck, it’s only the second time she’s even seen Marlene in person. The older woman promised her mother that she’d look after Ellie, but Marlene’s parenting style is as ‘hands off’ as it comes. A few strings pulled here and there. A warm bed in the best orphanage in the zone. A few extra food rations finding their way to the girl’s plate every now and then, especially around the holidays or during particularly lean times. Never enough to draw anyone’s notice, but enough to make sure she’s fed properly. A bag of good clothes set aside for her before the rest of the donated garments go out to be distributed to the other kids. A billet in the military prep school when she’s old enough, swapping her to a different dormitory at the last minute to make sure she gets her own dorm room when she arrives to start her freshman year. Who could have guessed that Riley would throw a wrench in those plans? But it worked out. Marlene would have pulled even more strings if it hadn’t. As many as it took. Anything to keep the girl safe, fed, clothed, off the streets. Ellie was never even aware that favors were constantly being done for her until just recently, when Riley told her all about it on the roof of the mall three days ago. And now Marlene thinks that Ellie’s being a spoiled teenager who never appreciated how hard some of those favors were to negotiate to help the kid out.

“Ohhh-kay…” Ellie says, taking another deep breath before forcing out more words. Her throat is tight, her chest feels like it’s wrapped up with leather belts slowly squeezing the life out of her. Her hands shake. Her stomach churns. Her high voice is faltering, wobbly. “I’m going to show you something. Don’t kill me, okay? It’s _not_ what it looks like.”

Marlene is wary. Her mahogany hand drifts down to the pistol tucked into her belt. The sergeant at her shoulder tenses as well. The shotgun gun in his hands shifts slightly. The guard near the door thumbs senses the sudden danger. He thumbs the safety off on his submachine gun. The click is remarkably loud in the suddenly silent room.

_Oh God. Okay. Okay. Be cool. She was mom’s friend. She won’t kill me. But I gotta talk fast._

Marlene’s eyes are scared. Taking care of this girl was something she had sworn to do. Getting the kid away from the maelstrom of her life was the smart call. The only call. It was the safest thing for the kid. She wasn’t cut out to be a mom anyway. Anna knew that but who else was she going to turn to? She was dying! There wasn’t anyone else. They were friends. It was a lot to ask, but who else could she turn to? The doctors couldn’t stop the bleeding. There just wasn’t time. And how do you say ‘no’ to your friend under those circumstances? She’d made the best of a bad situation, for herself and the kid.

In contrast to her worried eyes, Marlene’s voice is flat and emotionless when she speaks.

“What in the hell are you trying to say, Ellie?”

The girl swallows hard. She takes another deep breath. She reaches for the cuff of the sleeve covering her right arm. Her shaking hand begins to push it up gingerly from her wrist. She speaks very, very slowly and very, very clearly.

“Please don’t kill me, Marlene. Seriously. I can explain…”

_No, I can’t. I can’t explain this. I don’t have any fucking idea what this is…Something is… wrong with me… Really, really wrong…_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A potentially sexy evening turns very melancholy instead. Sometimes rain can be romantic. Other times it can be a mood killer. It mostly depends on how long you were stuck out in the storm.
> 
> How the two Fireflies in the SUV ran afoul of the army so far from any quarantine zone was originally told in a series of artifacts that Ellie and Joel found. But since this story was running long, I trimmed all of that out. I may hint at some of it in future installments or maybe I’ll just leave it as one more mystery that will go unsolved along the American highways. ;-)
> 
> The leather bag filled with bottle caps was a nod to the Fallout series. Man, I loved that first game. It seems primitive now, but it was a hell of an experience back in the day. 
> 
> Phillip Liu, the Firefly assigned to guard Ellie in the old restaurant, is one of the Fireflies you find lying dead in the street right after Joel meets Ellie for the first time. Ellie probably didn’t spend too much time mourning him.
> 
> The way I read it, Marlene never really cared much for Ellie as a person. In her journals, she even goes so far as to refer to her as “the fucking kid.” She tells Joel how hard it was to make the choice, but that feels almost like a bit of self-serving martyrdom to me. I think she may have liked Ellie, especially as the girl is all that is left of her mother, Anna, who was Marlene’s friend. But for someone who was supposed to raise Ellie, the fact that they two of them only spoke for the first time when Ellie and Riley accidentally ran into some Fireflies when Ellie was thirteen speaks volumes to me. I think Marlene viewed Ellie as an obligation more than anything. When the girl also happened to be immune to cordyceps, I think that’s when Ellie finally had some value to Marlene, mostly because of the benefit she now represents to the Fireflies – that’s the only thing that Marlene really cares about, the potential for the vaccine she carries. She spent more time with Ellie in the three weeks after she was bitten than in the fourteen years before she was infected. Marlene wasn’t cruel to Ellie. She just didn’t do more than was necessary to fulfill her obligation to Anna. Marlene had her cause. She didn’t want or need a kid. You can view their relationship however you like, but that’s how I see it.
> 
> And we learn that the Fireflies were somehow involved in the fall of Hartford, leaving Henry and Sam homeless. For a group that started out with righteous goals, they don’t seem to have much luck with their initial cause of restoring liberty. They mostly just seem to fuck things up for everybody.
> 
> Next time, Ellie and Riley will take a walk though The Tall, Wet Grass. That’s the title of Chapter Eight of Miles To Go. See you then.


	8. The Tall, Wet Grass

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and Riley go for a swim and explore the beauty of untamed, unsullied nature.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
 **Chapter 08 – The Tall, Wet Grass**

 

The water was warm, not chilly at all, wonderful and inviting. Ellie swam through it like a fish. When she paused to look around at this rippling underwater world, a burnished red cloud danced and swirled around her head. The sunlight filtering down from the mirror-like surface overhead lit her hair like a halo as it twirled and danced around her eyes, waving in the current. The red glow from the corona of her hair was a pleasing contrast to the greenish sea around her.

“Like a water lamp,” Ellie giggled, her lovely naked form suspended in one the shafts of light stabbing down into the water from the world above. “But made out of hair.”

“Come on, Ellie,” Riley said, swimming up from the murky depths below. “We’re gonna be late.”

Ellie looked down, past her own gently kicking legs, to see her friend darting up from the cloudy darkness below her, naked, sleek and brown. Riley knifed through the gloom into the clearer waters above, her supple body twisting and turning, flawless mocha skin flashing in the shafts of filtered light. Gorgeous. The sight of her kindled a fire in Ellie’s body.

“Hold your seahorses,” Ellie giggled. “I wanna look around some more. We never come up here anymore.”

Riley stopped motionless within arm’s reach of her friend, the lovely older girl hovering in the water, perfectly still, graceful and at home here in a way her younger friend, with her milky white arms and legs gently working to keep her in place, never would be.

“Sea horses? Very punny,” Riley said, rolling her eyes, her own hair unbound as well, blossoming around her head like a dark dandelion swaying gently in a breeze. “Get that from one of your joke books?”

“Nope. Made it up just now,” Ellie grinned, very pleased with herself.

“That explains why it isn’t funny,” Riley smirked, subtly asserting her dominance over her friend.

“Pfft,” Ellie snarked, bubbles rushing from her mouth into the laurel green water. Her eyes narrowed in a playful challenge. “You wish you were half as funny as me, Riley.”

“You wish your tits were even half as big as mine.”

“Ouch.”

“Truce?”

“Truce.”

Riley glided over to kiss the younger girl. Ellie’s mouth received those lips happily.

“Mwah!” the older girl said, a few bubbles appearing from the reluctant parting of their lips. “Better now?”

“Better,” Ellie nodded, blushing lightly from head to toe, her nudity making it impossible to hide her virginal nervousness from Riley’s eyes. She never tired of kissing her older friend, but she was still a little shy about it.

“Good. Now come on. Let’s go.”

Ellie looked down at the deeper water that she and Riley had swum up from. Hundreds of tiny pinpricks of light were down there, flittering and capering in the darkness, oblivious. One by one, they were going out. When Riley spoke again, only a scant few dozen remained.

“Ready, Ellie?”

“But what about your friends” Ellie asked, motioning to the handful of remaining lights below.

“Don’t worry about them. They’ll be gone soon,” Riley said with a carefree shake of her head, the sphere of black hair moving slightly more slowly than the girl’s face it framed.

“Where are we going?” Ellie asked as Riley pivoted in place, the older girl pulling her legs up, ready to rocket off again.

“There’s someone I want you to meet!”

Riley was already off, her beautiful shape cutting through the shimmering green water. Ellie kicked her legs, trying to catch up. She had never been half the swimmer that Riley was.

“Slow down, you butt head!”

The two girls swam off together, the pair of them reflected in the rippling mirror of the world above, laughing and teasing one another. Beneath them, in the brooding gloom, the last dancing light went out for good. Ellie didn’t notice. She was too busy pushing the tall blades of grass aside. The field had grown untended a long time and the green blades reached high into the sky, towering over her head as she walked through the endless expanse of grass.

The day was warm. Late summer. The earth was firm beneath her naked feet and the grass was soft, like silk, not sharp at all. It yielded to her bare body as she walked, the green ribbons bending and twisting around her, brushing her skin, caressing her. She sighed and imagined Riley’s fingers on her skin, stroking her the way the grass was.

Ellie’s eyes widened.

Riley! She had been here just a minute ago. Where was she?

“Riley?!” Ellie called out, too loud, too shrill.

“I’m right here, scaredy cat,” Riley spoke from somewhere up ahead, hidden in tall strips of green. “Don’t wet yourself.”

“I’m not scared. I just can’t see you,” Ellie grumped. “And it’s the grass that’s wet, not me.”

It was only half true. Morning dew coated the grass. It coated her too, as she wove her way through unending emerald curtain. Her skin was glazed with wetness, leaving her naked form slick and shiny. The scattered rays of sunlight that managed to break through the swaying, weaving points of green high above dappled her bare body, making it glisten and sparkle.

“Slow down, Riley!” Ellie said nervously. “I don’t want to lose you! Wait up!”

“I’m tired of waiting,” Riley said, the pool cue behind her neck, resting across her shoulders, pressed against the blue collar of her cadet uniform shirt, held firm on each end by small, fine hands. She sighed dramatically. “Take the shot already, boo.”

“I will. I will,” Ellie muttered, studying the scattered balls resting on the green felt of the pool table.

It was an impossible shot and she knew it. But she didn’t want to lose yet another game to her older friend. She was stalling, more out of general principle than any hope of figuring out how to bank the cue ball without nudging the eight ball resting next to it, perched on the very edge of the pocket. The redhead tugged at the waistband of her cadet uniform pants, adjusting them a little. It was cool in the dormitory rec room this evening.

“Class is over. Why the hell are we still wearing our uniforms?” Ellie asked, trying to distract Riley, trying to stall for time. There were other girls waiting to use the table, girls in cadet uniforms, all without faces.

“Because _somebody_ still hasn’t done our laundry,” Riley said, the expression on her lovely face wry and a little accusing. She leaned back against the edge of the pool table, the dark blue polyester of her uniform slacks squeaking faintly against the old, worn Maple wood of the pool table. “It’s either this or we go naked, boo.”

“Get your ginormous butt off the table,” Ellie groused, still stalling, bending low over the table, studying her options, pretending to look for a shot they both knew didn’t exist. “You’re going to flip the whole thing over.”

Riley took the pool cue from across her shoulders, gripped it in both hands, and sliced it through the air in front her in a zig zag pattern, making lightsaber noises with her mouth.

“You are beaten! It is useless to resist!” Riley said in a cartoonishly deep voice. “Don’t make me destroy you!”

Riley began to whap Ellie lightly across the bottom with her pool cue.

“Nooooooooo” Ellie wailed softly, overdramatically, taking a perverse thrill from the sudden spanking, bending deeper, pushing her butt out, offering more of herself up for punishment. “That’s not true! That’s impossible!”

She sighed, dejected, as Riley crowed victoriously, her slender brown fingers reaching across the table for the white cue ball resting on the green felt.

“Betcha won’t eat it,” Riley said, plucking the fallen french fry from the short, well-tended lawn of the drive-in. It had fallen from the small box of fries she and Ellie were sharing while standing on the green grassy space in front of the concession stand, waiting for The Empire Strikes Back to start.

“No way!” Ellie giggled, her big, dangly, loops-within-loops earrings clinking lightly as she shook her head for emphasis. “Not with all these people watching!”

“Wuss,” Riley chided.

Ellie smiled slyly, leaning in conspiratorially but making a point of speaking too loudly. “I’m trying to be a classy fucking _lady_ , you uncouth cunt plug.”

“Fancy, huh? You _look_ the part, at least,” Riley razzed, tossing the little orphaned fry away, flinging it towards the general vicinity of the trashcans, where it would have to fend for itself.

The taller, darker girl plunged her hands into the pockets of her black denim jacket, the one with the patent black leather trim, the one Ellie loved to see her in so much. Her bust was accentuated by the tight, crimson tank top she wore underneath. Ellie liked to see her in that too. Riley stepped just a little closer to Ellie, careful to keep her high, black motorcycle boots a safe distance from her younger friend’s dainty, high-heeled feet.

“I like the earrings, and the belly chain – especially with that crop top. And the mini skirt too. You’ve got enough makeup on for both of us. Very slutty for someone trying to be classy,” Riley needled cockily, her dark eyes taking in every inch of her dolled up friend. “But what kind of dumb bitch wears ‘fuck me’ pumps to the drive-in?”

“A classy dumb bitch like me, you jealous lezzie dyke!” Ellie smirked, kicking lightly at Riley with the toe of her high-heeled sandal. ”Jeez. You look like a biker, Riley!”

“Rather look like a biker than a bimbo,” Riley smiled deviously, crossing her arms with an easy confidence, the thick leather of her boots more than enough protection against the wobbling onslaught of Ellie and her red toenails. With those silly shoes, Ellie stood almost as tall as she did. Sexy sure, but shoes like that weren’t much use for fighting. Riley prepared herself to catch Ellie, who was becoming increasingly unbalanced with each weak swing of her spike-heeled foot.

Ellie stopped kicking at her. People were staring. There was always a crowd at the drive-in. Ellie reminded herself that she was trying to be sophisticated and classy and shit. None of the people had faces, but that hardly mattered, you can still stare without eyes. And Ellie was trying to be _classy_ , damn it.

“You’re just sad because my legs are so much nicer than yours,” Ellie harrumphed in her best haughty, ‘fancy lady’ voice, playing with the straw in her diet soda. She twirled it around through the little hole in the plastic lid, her red fingernails holding it by the tip. “Now didn’t you say there was someone you wanted me to meet?”

“Yeah,” Riley replied, her smoldering eyes lingering on Ellie’s shapely legs. “If you can make it across the grass in those stupid shoes.”

“Shut up. You’re the one who bought me these shoes, you ass,” Ellie winked coyly. She raised the straw of the diet soda to her mouth and wrapped her glossy red lips around the swollen head of his cock. He groaned as she sucked it softly.

Riley’s face was close to hers, the two of them almost cheek to cheek, as they shared his hard, long member. Riley’s tongue was out, sloppy and wet, sliding up and down the length of it as Ellie teased the tip with quick little flicking circles of her own tongue. Her long red fingernails scratched lightly at his balls.

“Jesus,” he groaned, shuddering, pushing it towards them, savoring the attention, needing even more from them, needing their combined efforts, needing release. His big hands gently stroked the sides of their heads affectionately as they licked and sucked at him. His voice was deep, manly, and unmistakably Texan. “Christ, you girls are really somethin’.”

Riley purred as she licked the full length of him, slowly, skillfully, from top to bottom, her voice soft and meant for the white girl just inches away, both of them squeezed into the floorboard of the backseat of the old Camaro, naked from the waist up, bare breasted, their shirts off, piled next to the man reclining on the dark green vinyl seat. “Aren’t you glad I let you watch me do this to Montego that night on the roof of the dorm?”

“Let me?” whispered Ellie, moving over a little, passing it to Riley, who took it into her mouth hungrily, making him groan again, gratefully. “You didn’t even know I was hiding up there!”

“Yeah,” hissed Riley, licking at the engorged, velvety soft head as Ellie gripped it by the throbbing shaft, near the base, down by his pubic hair, her small hand holding his large cock in place for her older, more experienced friend. “But I didn’t kill you when I found out about it later.”

Ellie giggled and watched Riley work, watched how easily she took him into her mouth, her plump lips wrapped around it, wet and slick, working their way down, closer and closer to his balls, until every hard inch of him was swallowed up, until Ellie could feel Riley’s moist lips against her hand, down by the base, near his balls.

“Jesus, girl!” he grunted.

“Jesus, Riley,” Ellie whispered. “Slow down a little, okay?”

“I’ll go as slow as you want, Ellie,”

His whispered words were hot in her ear. He held her close to him with one hand, his other hand on her bare belly, two of his fingertips resting under the elastic waistband of her panties. Her shirt and shorts were off, laying on the green carpeting of the Motel 6, somewhere in the open space on the floor between their beds, wadded up, discarded, along with her treasured copy of ‘No Pun Intended – Volume Too’. He kissed her cheek and she nuzzled against his beard. She trembled. She was topless, her breasts bare. She had never let a man see her like this before. She had never expected to want to let a man see her like this. But he was different. She wanted him to look, wanted him to see, wanted to show herself to him. But she hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. She was nervous. She had only come over here to read a few good puns to him, maybe cheer him up a little after the sad, creepy stories he had told her about the airport in Oklahoma City and Original Matt, the funny guy with all the jokes who had been dead a long time. That’s all she came over here for. A late night pun session. To cheer him up. But she’d kissed him instead. And now he was about to take her panties off. It was all happening so fast. Too fast? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t think clearly. She used to be able to think, but then he had kissed her breasts and her brains must’ve fallen out or something.

“Do you want me to stop?” he asked in a low, rumbly voice. It sent little thrills running through her, emanating out from that special little spot so near his questing fingers.

“N-no,” she gulped, afraid he might let her escape this seduction. She wanted more. She needed more. She didn’t want him to stop. She wanted to be braver. She wanted to be experienced, like Riley. She spoke into his bearded jaw in a girlish voice she hated, wishing it were smokier, sultrier, instead of shaking and stuttering, a weightless little breeze of a voice. “N-no. Don’t… don’t stop, okay? Keep going! Please?”

“Maybe we should slow down, Ellie,” he whispered, planting a series of kisses across her cheek, coming ever closer to her quivering lips. His hot breath rolled across her open mouth. She reached for him with her lips.

“No… no… I w-want to… I ‘m just…” Her words were swallowed up by the kiss.

His hand slid into her panties, his fingers gliding through her warm tangle of hair, finding her wet and swollen, with plump lips, tender, slick and half-parted, open and waiting for his touch.

“Ohhhh fffffuuuuuuuckk.” Barely formed words. A shuddering exhalation into his mouth, breaking the seal, ending the amazing kiss. A body broiling with a sweet, confusing heat, telling her to keep going, to let him do this, to let him show her how things could be between a man and a woman, or between a man and a girl who was close enough. She arched her body against the soft, comfortable mattress. “Joel… I… I’m…”

“A virgin,” he said, his lips soft on her neck, his beard wonderfully scratchy. “Nothin’ wrong with that, kiddo.”

“Yeah. And I’m glad we waited,” she said from the sink of the old storeroom. She swished the baking soda from her mouth with a little water from her canteen. Joel sat over in the corner, on the pile of flattened cardboard boxes. Her green army blanket was spread out across his legs, the peak of his erection rising up from beneath the wool. He was naked, his bare chest hairy and broad, strong, masculine. She loved him. And loved looking at him.

“You sure you’re ready?” he asked, sliding over to make room for her as she padded across the cold concrete floor on bare feet. “We don’t have to do this tonight. Won’t kill us to wait a little more.”

She stood at the edge of the sleeping pallet, wearing his purple flannel shirt, her body mostly covered by it, with only her tantalizingly bare legs hinting at her utter nakedness inside the shirt.

“If I have to wait one more minute, I’ll explode from all the horniness,” Ellie giggled.

Joel smiled and lifted the blanket, inviting her inside with him. Her eyes flowed across his naked body. She blushed, bit her bottom lip, and began to unbutton the shirt she wore. His eyes watched her intently, taking in every detail of her body as she slowly revealed it to him.

Naked now, she knelt down at the edge of the cardboard bedding and slipped under the blanket with him. He wrapped them up against the cool, damp air. It was raining outside, pattering on the roof of the old convenience store, but it was warm and cozy beneath the covering of green wool. They kissed, as they had so many nights before on this journey across America, their lips coming together with the familiarity and confidence of long-time lovers. They almost were. Only one bridge remained to be crossed.

“Lay back, Ellie,” he husked against her breasts, small and soft, cupped in his large hands. “Let me get you warmed up, pretty girl.”

She knew what that meant. ‘Warming her up’ was his way of saying he was going to use his mouth on her pussy until she squealed his name. It was almost a game to him sometimes, seeing how far he could take her, how many times he could send her over the edge. If he couldn’t fuck her, he was still going to make her beg for more however he could. Her thighs trembled at the thought of it. But not tonight. Tonight she wanted something else from him and she couldn’t wait, not for one more second.

“I’m already warmed up,” she moaned, arching her back, pressing her little tits into his calloused palms. His beard was exquisite against her nipples. Her soft laughter was throaty and deep, lustful, womanly. “You don’t have to eat me out tonight. Not even kidding, Joel. C’mon. I’m ready. Very, _very_ ready, I swear.”

“But I was hopin’ for a little desert after supper,” he whispered, her lips on her belly button.

“Damn it, Joel Miller. Fuck me right now! Fuck me or I’m going to start punching you!”

They kissed again, passionately, deeply, as she lay back on the cardboard, opening her legs, making room for him as he positioned himself above her. She could feel him, big and hard against her wet, yearning sex. She tilted her hips forward, the proper alignment of her body for his coming easy to her, almost a natural instinct. He held himself in his hand, guided his member to her dewy, silken entrance.

“Last chance to change your mind,” he husked, at the very limits of his self-control.

“C’mmmmmoonnnnn,” she groaned, smiling, desperate, burning, craving. She was horny. She was in love.

Riley had told her that it hurt the first time. But she was wrong. It felt good. It felt right. It felt exactly like it had than morning in Boston, on the rooftop of the old mall, when Riley had slid her wonderful, slim mocha finger inside the quivering pink folds of her virginal pussy, penetrating her body with something other than her own digits for the first time. A familiar, well-remembered feeling.

“Oh, God… Ellie…” His face was above hers as he worked his hard cock inside her.

She craned her neck up to kiss this man she loved so much, overjoyed to have finally surrendered her virginity to him. They would be together forever now. She would never be alone again. He began to move faster, groaning with each thrust, getting closer to a release he wouldn’t be able to hold back much longer. She felt it rising inside her as well, and she knew they were going to climax together, just like the couples in Riley’s smutty paperbacks, the ones who were meant to be together, the ones with real love, the soulmates. Her head tilted back, she wrapped her arms around him. He grunted. She cried out. The moment was here. For him and for her. They were coming, their bodies moving together, reaching a shared climax, in perfect union. They were soulmates, just like she knew they would be.

White light. Bliss. Steam. Wetness. The sensation of flying. The smell of fermented cabbage, for some reason.

 

* * *

 

Ellie sat straight up, daylight streaming from a small window set high in the wall, the green army blanket falling down, getting bunched up around her waist. She blinked rapidly, her loins burning from a rising orgasm so close to happening that her entire body was shaking from it. The lavender Steve Miller Band shirt was all twisted up around her torso. The cardboard she was sitting on was warm and a little pliant under her bottom. Her pussy was on fire, scorching her with a liquid heat that had soaked her panties and was sending tendrils of lustful hunger up through her belly and down her bare legs.

“Holy shit!” she gasped, pulling in deep, fast breaths. She closed her eyes, lowered her head, tried to shake herself loose from the dream. She trembled. Her hands shook. Her nipples were rock hard points against the fabric of her twisted shirt. Her bare stomach was full of butterflies. Her pussy scalded her, screaming at her, begging her for release. She gasped and a small tremor raced through her enflamed body. “Fuck…. That was… _intense_.”

“You okay, kiddo?”

Her eyes flew open wide, her head whipped to the side, her mouth open in shock, her eyes wide with worry, guilt, panic, shock, lust.

Joel was sitting a few feet away, dressed. He even had his boots on. He had the little multi-fuel camp stove going, a low flame rising up from the burner, a concoction of meat and veggies simmering in the aluminum bowl of his mess kit. His face was a little concerned, and a little amused. The face of the man she knew. Maybe her friend. Probably. But not her lover. That man existed only in her dreams. This was just Joel, and Joel didn’t want her that way. To this man, she wasn’t a woman. For one wild, lunatic instant, the realization of that made her want to cry.

“You okay?” he repeated, stirring the food in the bowl, making breakfast for them, just like the Joel she knew always did.

“Umm…” She sniffled. She had to think fast. “Nightmare! Bad dream, you know?”

“Oh yeah?” He lifted up a spoonful of the meal. Spam and sauerkraut. He had made this before. She disliked the smell of it, but couldn’t deny the taste.

She wiped at her eyes, stammered her way through more words. “Yeah… really bad… so _real_ , you know?”

“Those are rough, no two ways about it,” he agreed, giving breakfast a taste test. He smiled. It passed inspection. “Breakfast is ready. C’mon over here, kiddo, and I’ll get a bowl ready for you.”

Her pussy was a blazing hot fountain. She was certain she was practically spraying the cardboard under her butt with a wild torrent of her juices. She couldn’t let him see her like this. Not like _this_.

She stood up as though she were spring loaded, like a jack in the box, wrapping the green blanket around her waist, hiding her belly, her legs, her pussy, her soaking wet panties. She was afraid to look down. She was sure she had left a wet spot on the cardboard. She was certain she was going to drip a trail of her own lusty lady fluids across the floor, but she had to get out of sight and fast. There was something she had to do.

”Just a sec,” she blurted out, moving quickly across the storeroom, towards the little room marked ‘Employee Restroom ONLY’. “Gotta pee!”

As she darted past him, her bare feet slapping on the concrete floor, he handed her one of the old two liter soda bottles they’d taken from Fort Overpass.

“Here, kiddo. That toilet’s gonna be dry. Take this –“

“Thanks!” she said, grabbing the bottle, never slowing down.

“-water,” he finished.

The bathroom door flew open, slammed shut. A moment later, she dashed back out, the big water bottle in the crook of her arm, the blanket wrapped around her hips, feet carrying her back across the room at a ridiculously fast and shuffling gate.

“Dark,” she snapped, angry, flustered, embarrassed. She grabbed her flashlight from its place beside her backpack and her guns, flicking it on as she spun around and resumed her journey back across the floor with a fast, tiny stride. “Light.”

She dashed back into the bathroom, her legs moving in that silly, clipped gait, bound up by green wool and altogether much too fast. The door slammed shut. Silence followed.

Joel sat there on the floor, almost expecting a powerful breeze to appear in her wake, pulling along tumbleweeds and old newspapers, like in those old Bugs Bunny cartoons he and Tommy used to watch at their grandma’s house, when dad was drunk and mom was ‘at her sister’s house’. He wanted to smile, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know what Ellie was doing in that bathroom: masturbating hard, both lips pulled tightly into her mouth, working her sloppy, dripping pussy with both hands, frenetically rubbing her stiff clit, her wet folds, the tile of the wall cold against her ass, damp panties twisted around her ankles, sweat-slick thighs wide apart and quivering, seeing stars behind her pinched-shut eyes, holding her breath, feeling guilty, forcing herself to stay quiet even as the massive orgasm she had finally unleashed shook her small body almost to the point of convulsion.

He didn’t know.

But he suspected.

He had heard the noises she was making in those few minutes while she was tangled up inside her blanket, before she woke up, sat up, gasping, and shaking. Noises he wouldn’t have thought her young body was capable of making. Noises of need, of lust, of desire. Animal noises. Sex noises.

Ellie’s sex noises.

Hot, dirty, sensual, erotic sounds. The sounds a woman makes. The sounds he loved to hear when he had a woman in his arms.

He wanted Ellie in his arms.

His cock was hard. That’s why he had one leg up, hiding it, even before she woke up. He wanted her. Wanted to hear her make those noises again. Wanted to do the things to her that would make her make those noises again.

He wanted to fuck that girl.

He hated himself for it, but it was the truth. He wanted to fuck Ellie… hard…. again and again… every night, every morning, every chance they got… he wanted to make her come… to hear her groan… to hear her squeal… to hear her make those sounds, again and again and again. He wanted to fuck that hell out of that girl.

He’d had thoughts like that ever since that night in the Motel 6, when he first became aware of how close she was to womanhood.

But it was worse now. He had heard not just the noises, but a word as well. _The_ word. The only word he needed to hear, the one word he never wanted to hear her say, not like that, not in that way. She’d said it a hundred times, at least. Maybe a thousand times. It was possible. She talked all the time. She never shut up. She said that word over and over, every day, all the time.

But she’d never said it like that, never quite like _that_ , with such aching, reckless, breathless longing.

One word.

One fucking word.

Now everything was going to change between them.

Everything.

All because of one word.

She’d said it, it had slipped from her open mouth, every letter of that four letter word dripping with hot lust, pulled up from her soul by the intensity of the sexual dream that had held fast her in its grip, drawing the truth from her, from the secret place inside her that every women tried to hide, lest the answer to her riddle be learned and she become owned by it, shackled by it, tamed by it. A word more groaned than spoken, really, let loose in a whisper that rose from her tongue, carried aloft on the hot air rising from her sexually charged body, like heat shimmering over blacktop on a hot summer day. One word, half spoken. But she _had_ said it.

One word.

“Joel.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This dream was a blast to write, pulling in all kinds of elements and imagery from previous chapters, assembling it from Ellie’s subconscious like an erotic, patchwork quilt.
> 
> And she moaned his name in her sleep, so now Joel knows that Ellie wants him. She doesn’t know that he wants her yet, but at least one of them knows the secret desires of the other. Joel knows he shouldn’t want her, of course. But now that seed has been planted in his head. Can he resist giving in to the thing they both want long enough for him to pawn her off on Tommy and get out her life before it’s too late?
> 
> Anyhoo, come back next time when Joel remembers the hard lessons of Pittsburgh and takes the long way around obvious trouble in Chapter Nine: Back Roads.


	9. Back Roads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The town was full of hunters. They needed to find a detour. They needed to locate another way across the river, a way that didn’t take them through the hunter’s town. They needed a better alternative than the only other bridge they could find. But there wasn’t any other way…

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 09 – Back Roads**

 

Joel’s thoughts were as dark and winding as the road they were on.

This little girl moaned my name. She had a dirty dream and she moaned my name.

They were moving at maybe thirty miles an hour or so. Not bad for a twenty-two year old motorcycle gracefully weaving and banking and rolling down blacktop that hadn’t seen a road crew or so much as a single asphalt patch for twenty years.

She’s fourteen. She’s just a damn kid.

A long ragged line of old cars, clustered together, left there by panicked owners years and years before, in the early days of the outbreak, huddling together, uncertain what to do or where to go when no place seemed safe, a tiny community formed along the side of the road, their only means of escape low on gas, becoming their homes instead, now rusting in the sun. Joel threaded around the old, abandoned heaps easily. Behind him, Ellie held her shotgun ready, always watchful when needed, without being told. A good kid, no doubt about it. But maybe not as much of a kid as he had thought.

She’s fourteen and she wants me to fuck her. She’s dreaming about it.

The little town of Hobbs, Indiana was almost seventy-five miles behind them. They were making good time on this road.

Jesus, what the hell am I supposed to do with that?

The cracks weren’t too big; the plants growing up from the split blacktop weren’t very numerous; except for the odd, stunted tree, it was pretty easy to steer around this mess. They would cross the Wabash River soon.

Fuck, why the hell couldn’t she be older? Or younger. Too young for me to think of her this way. A lot older or a lot younger. This in-between stuff is killing me.

She leaned against him, her helmeted head close to his cheek. She laughed, full of life. It made his stirring cock whisper her name to him in a voice only he could hear. She spoke too, louder than his cock, but just as enticingly. She brimmed with joy. It warmed him.

“Man, we are hauling ass today, Joel! Woooooo!!”

Goddamn, I want to fuck her so bad it’s killing me.

“Yep,” he said, his faint smile betraying none of the reprehensible lust twisting in his gut. “We should cross the Wabash in a few minutes, and then we keep following 28 till it turns into 119.”

“And that’ll be Illinois, right?”

“Yep. We’ll be in Illinois pretty soon.”

“Fucking sweet! Do we have a map of Illinois?”

“You tell me. You’re the navigator, right?”

“Navigation _officer_ , Captain Miller. And if we have one, then it’s not loaded into our ship’s computer,” she said, patting the zippered compartment on his backpack where he kept their small collection of maps.

“So I guess we’ll have to stop and look for one pretty soon,” Joel said, his eyes picking out something strange on the road ahead. His voice began to fade as distraction overtook him. “Ours only shows as far west… as the little town… of… Alvin…”

The bike slowed to a stop, brakes squealing softly. Beneath their front tire, a large red X had been spray painted on the road.

“Is that Spanish?” Ellie asked, remembering Tino and the upside down exclamation points he often used when he scribbled dirty words into the margins of his textbooks. She pointed ahead, unnecessarily.

Joel saw them too. Giant red letters sprayed across the asphalt.

              ¡PELIGRO!  
          ¡GAMBERROS!  
          ¡RETROCEDER!

The paint wasn’t old. The sun and the rain hadn’t faded it away yet. The warning was new, probably no more than a week old.

“Yeah,” Joel groused, clearly unhappy.

“What’s it say? It’s bad, isn’t it?” Ellie asked. Giant red letters scrawled across the road couldn’t be good.

“Yeah. ‘Peligro’ is Spanish for ‘danger’,” Joel sighed. “And ‘gamberros’ more or less means ‘bad guys’.”

“Oh shit,” Ellie groaned, cold dread making icicles of her muttered words.

“Yeah,” Joel agreed ruefully. “Shit.”

Attica was a smudge on the horizon, a few miles away, and mostly hidden behind tall trees along the way. Joel put the kickstand down and began to climb off. Ellie scrambled off before he did, younger and faster than her older companion. Nimble. Lithe. Sexy. Joel tried not to notice that aspect of her, and left the engine running.

“So what’s the plan, Joel?” Ellie asked, watching as he took their hunting rifle from the high crest of the fairing over the back of the bike, where it had hung behind the upper seat by its leather sling, next to his shotgun. The shotgun was his, she didn’t dispute that, but she was beginning to think of the Winchester as ‘theirs’.

“Gonna take a look-see,” he muttered, already expecting the worst.

“‘Kay.” She held her own shotgun with both hands, looking around, being a good sentry.

It was better to be on the move, not stopped in the middle of the road like this. They hadn’t seen many people on their journey, and most of them were on foot, but there had been that army convoy out of Cleveland a few days ago. And earlier today, just a few miles after they had left the ‘Kwik Pick’ store, on their way through the town of Tipton, while they were stopped and siphoning gasoline, they had seen a rusty old pickup truck pulling a crudely fashioned trailer piled with lashed-down supplies, the bed of the Ford loaded with still more cargo and several armed men, traveling north on US 31. It was pure blind luck that he and the kid had been on the other side of that ‘Little Debbie’ delivery truck, pulling gas out of it’s tank with the hose Bill had given him, the both of them and their Honda safely hidden from view when those guys drove by, just a half mile on the other side of that old white delivery truck.

He shuddered at the thought of how badly that could have gone for them as he lifted the Winchester rifle to his shoulder and let the scope show him what he already suspected to see.

The small city of Attica on the banks of the Wabash River looked like a hunter encampment judging from the number of smoke columns rising from the city, blending against the gray of the overcasts sky, hard to spot at this distance without the scope.

“See anything?” she asked, remembering the men in the back of the old truck, her eyes nervously scanning the road in both directions.

He muttered, unhappy at this turn of events. “Lots of people there, that’s for sure.”

“Shit,” she said and kicked at a stupid stone lying on the stupid road. It flew into the tall grass growing wild at the crumbling edge of asphalt. “I really wanted to see the Wabash River.”

“You will.” He hung the rifle on the back of the bike again. “The Wabash ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

“How? Aren’t we going to stay out of that town?”

“We are. But we sure ain’t gonna fly over that river, Red. We gotta cross it _somewhere_ , yeah? We’ll find another bridge, squirt.”

“Oh.… Right… Another bridge… Of course.“ Ellie looked away, suddenly feeling very dumb. Her face reddened and she couldn’t make eye contact. Her emotions swung wildly from anger to embarrassment. “It was just a brain fart, okay? Like _you’ve_ never had one… Pfft… Jerk… Just… don’t tease, okay? Don’t be a dick.”

“I’m not,” he sighed, somehow managing to sound exasperated and reassuring at the same time. He unshouldered his pack and unzipped the compartment that held their map.

Ellie risked a look back at him, avoiding eye contact, still feeling dumb, still with blazing red cheeks, afraid to say anything. Her mouth twisted down a little, glumly. Her body language spoke of feeling awkward, of not measuring up, of not being the badass partner she so badly wanted to be for him. She was relieved that he wasn’t looking at her.

He had been looking, for just a second, though she never suspected. While she had been facing away, down the highway they had come from, his eyes had been fixed on her backside, at the pleasing curve of her ass, the shape of her supple thighs, the smallness of her waist, half-hidden by the backpack she wore. He had been looking. For just a second. And he hated that he hadn’t been able to stop himself.

Christ almighty, that girl’s got one sweet little ass, he thought to himself as he unfolded the map and she took a few small, tentative steps towards him. He didn’t notice her worry, the distress on her face, the expression that silently asked ‘am I good enough?’

“Here. Help me check the map,” he said, holding it flat near the idling Honda, patting the blacktop for her to kneel down next to him. “We gotta see where there’s another bridge somewhere close by.”

“Right,” she said brightly, glad to have that minor slip forgiven, unaware that Joel hadn’t really registered it at all. She dropped down next to him, probably a little too close, feeling the air warm between them, and her emerald eyes began to dart along the squiggles printed on the map, scanning for Attica, the Wabash River, Indiana Highway 29, something she could use to get her bearings.

Her finger stabbed at the paper.

“There! We’re here, right?” she asked.

”Yep. That’s us,” he said, not looking at her, but smiling a little. “Good job, navigation officer.”

She smiled too.

“Oh Captain, you can call me Lieutenant Williams if you want.”

 

* * *

 

_Man, Joel, what would you do without me?_

_Get lost, that’s what._

_You need me, buddy. Better accept it._

She tapped his shoulder.

“Turn left here!” she said, the map she held pressed against his backpack folded up to show only this meandering cluster of back roads southeast of Attica. As the self-appointed official navigation officer, she knew it wasn’t good for the map to bend and fold it like this, but it didn’t matter. They would be in Illinois soon. The map of Indiana was nearing the end of its usefulness.

_But not me. I’m useful. I’m super useful. Shit, I’m hella useful. He needs me._

The sign at the edge of the two-lane back road read ‘Covered Bridge Road’. To Ellie, that sounded very promising. To Joel, it spoke of cordyceps growing in dark confined spaces where daylight couldn’t reach. He grimaced and banked the Honda to the left. It wasn’t as though he had too many choices, not unless he wanted to risk even larger towns to the north and south, and the possibility of even larger numbers of hunters.

“Keep going until we cross highway 55,” she said, studying the map closely, the edges of it flapping in the wind. Her small hands held it flat against his pack with great determination. Losing the only the map was not something a navigation officer would do. “About four miles, I think. Then stay on this road until we get to County Road 170.”

“Gotcha,” Joel said, scanning the fields, the woods, the old, collapsing farmhouses they were passing. “Doin’ a good job back there, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks, Captain. After 170, we’ll hit Pond Road and take that to Williamsport Road. I’ll let you know when we’re getting close to the next turn.”

“Sounds good.”

_Yep. Totally needs me. And it’s good to have a sexy captain on a long journey. I wonder what his policy is regarding romances between the crew? Because I’ve got my eyes on a certain older, sexy, bearded somebody onboard this ship…_

 

* * *

 

The covered bridge must have been in the other direction. The little, two-lane bridge crossing the Wabash River was in poor shape, with several chunks having fallen off years before into the dark currents below, but it wasn’t a covered bridge by any stretch of the imagination.

“Awww. What a gyp. That’s just a regular bridge,” Ellie groused into his ear, her visor up, looking ahead at the tattered, ratty thing spanning the watery divide. As they drew closer, she noticed the big, jagged gaps, the large portions of the deck missing. It reminded her of the pictures she had seen of cartoon yellow cheese in some of her old comic books. “Oh shit, Joel. It looks like Swiss cheese.”

“Yeah, it sure does,” he said bitterly, his mind working.

“How the hell did they get those holes get in Swiss cheese anyway?” she prattled on, studying the map, looking for another route. “Have you ever had any? I haven’t. Does it taste good?”

“Ellie, hush up a minute.”

“Okay. Sure. Sorry.” She sounded stung, wounded by his words.

“I’m not mad, girl. I just need a minute to think.”

Ellie had more to say, more about cheese, more about the bridge. But she kept her mouth shut. Joel’s thinking time was serious business. She didn’t want him snapping at her.

A long moment passed, the engine idling quietly, the breeze blowing softly. The rhythm of the gently lapping waves against the edge of the shore below carried up to them.

“Alright, Ellie,” he said with a deep, resigned sigh. “Get off the bike.”

“Umm… okay.” She quickly folded the map and stuffed it into his pack.

The girl climbed down and watched as he shucked his pack while still sitting on the bike. He handed it to her and she slung her shotgun to take the heavy thing with both hands.

“What’s goin-“ she began.

“I need you to hang onto this for me, kiddo.”

He didn’t tell her what he was really thinking. He didn’t say ‘There’s lot of stuff in here that you’re gonna need to get by if somethin’ happens to me’. He didn’t want to scare her.

“What are you talking about, Joel?” No more ‘captain’, no more ‘lieutenant’, no more games.

“I want you to walk behind the bike,” he said. “In case I can’t make it across.”

“What? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You said it yourself, kiddo. That bridge has more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese.”

“So you’re going across _without me_?!” Her mouth fell open. “That’s bullshit, Joel!”

“Just follow along behind me. If me and the bike go over, I’ll swim to the bank and meet you up on the road over there Okay?”

“No! It’s not okay, you ass! What if you drown? Don’t be stupid!”

“There ain’t no other bridges around here on the map, Ellie. It’s this or we leave the bike parked here and walk the rest of the way to Wyoming.”

“Then we’ll walk!” she said, her eyes pleading. “I’d rather walk there with you than try to find my way there on my own because you drowned like a dumbass in the Wabash Fucking River!”

Joel levered the bike into first gear.

“I’m getting on,” she said with fiery determination, stepping towards the bike.

He reached out and pressed his fingertips against her collarbone, stopping her in her tracks. She held his pack and stood her ground. She didn’t back up.

“ _NO_. Just walk behind me. Okay?”

“Joel…” Her voice was so soft it barely carried over the sounds of the engine and the river. “Please don’t… if something happens…”

The shitty old bridge was maybe 800 feet long. To Ellie, it was an impossible, terrifying length for Joel to travel alone. It might as well have stretched to the moon. He _needed_ her. In case something happened. Like it _always_ did! How could he not see that?

“I’ll be fine, kid.” He said, smiling tightly, his eyes firm behind his shooter’s glasses. “Remember those army tanks we had to drive around? Back in Ohio? That pavement was broke up and busted all to hell too. And I got this big red bitch around through that mess just fine. Remember?”

“Yeah. Duh!” she said, her eyes flashing with anger, her mouth drawn together tightly, grudgingly allowing him a single point in this argument. “But those gaps weren’t this fucking big… And the drop was six inches deep, dummy. This is a lot fucking deeper.”

“I know,” he smiled, showing him how assured and confident he was. “I got through that… and I’ll get through this. I’m just tryin’ to keep you dry, squirt. That’s all.”

She was on the verge of tears. It was all she had left to reach out to him. They shimmered in the corners of her eyes. Ellie wasn’t too proud to turn on the waterworks when she had to. Her voice cracked when she spoke.

“Joel… _Please_ let me get on.”

He smiled lopsidedly, feigning cockiness, hoping it would comfort her, give her strength somehow. He wasn’t going to risk her life. The water down there was moving too damn fast and he didn’t give himself good odds on the stupid thing he was about to attempt. He gave even worse odds to a girl who couldn’t swim if she got dunked in those waters.

“You just walk along behind me, Ellie. I promise I’ll go slow.”

He eased out the clutch and pulled onto the bridge, leaving Ellie standing behind, on the side of the road where he had left her, her ponytail dancing in the breeze, her small hands clutching his big backpack tightly across her chest with white knuckles, her mouth a tight, furious line of incandescent anger, her eyes sick with worry.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ellie’s secret is out (though she doesn’t know it yet), and it’s eating at Joel. He could manage his desire for her when he thought it was something only he was feeling. But now he knows she wants the same thing he does. And the two of them are still two weeks away from Jackson at the speed they’re traveling – and that’s if they manage to hang on to the bike (and we know they won’t!). How much longer can Joel continue to resist the need Ellie is stirring up in him? How much longer before she becomes brave enough to bring her own desires out in the open? When will the reckless, damn the consequences, live for the moment, smooching begin? WHEN?!? I’m on the edge of my seat here!! ;-)
> 
> Also, the Spanish word Joel didn’t know, ‘retroceder’ means ‘go back’, more or less.
> 
> Check back soon when Joel and Ellie spend a long day on the road, putting miles behind them, and putting their maps to good use in Chapter Ten: Bookmarks.


	10. Bookmarks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel and Ellie spend a long day on the road.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 10 – Bookmarks**

 

The front of Joel’s shirt was soaked with sweat. His fingers ached from how tightly he had been clenching the controls of the motorcycle, but he didn’t dare let go of the rubber grips lest the girl notice how badly his hands would shake if he didn’t have something to hold onto.

Ellie came running up behind him, her legs kicking into high gear once she cleared the end of the rotted bridge and had solid asphalt under her feet again. She was struggling a bit with the heavy pack she was carrying for him, but she didn’t seem to mind. The girl was grinning, exuberant, almost flying with sheer joy.

The bridge had been bad, no doubt about that. How he had managed to inch the large, heavy Gold Wing over some of the worse spots, where twenty years of neglect had left sizeable gaps in the brittle and pocked concrete of the narrow bridge, he couldn’t say. Ellie had likened the surface of the long, narrow bridge to Swiss cheese and Joel couldn’t argue with her assessment. More than once, as he had slowly crept along the edge of long crack or eased around a large hole in the old deck, fist-sized chunks had suddenly fallen away just inches from his wheels. Every time another piece of the bridge had fallen into the river below, Ellie, walking along behind, had exclaimed with a ‘shit!’ or a ‘fuck!’ for good measure. Her running commentary had done nothing good for his nerves. The old span was so lousy that she hadn’t found the going much easier on foot. But the fearful crossing was behind her now. She was nothing but smiles and brimming elation.

“Fuck, that was stupid, Joel!” she said, still smiling excitedly. “I told you that bridge was dangerous!”

Smiles, brimming with elation, and score keeping.

“What? Did you think we were going to lose the bike?” He leaned back on the bike, his legs holding the idling Honda steady. He crossed his arms for extra smugness, and to hide any shakiness that might still be left in his hands. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to walk to Wyoming. And what’re you gripin’ about? We made it across didn’t we?”

“Shut up and take this thing,” she said, rolling her eyes and holding his backpack out for him to take. “I’m not your pack mule, you big jerk.”

He waited a moment, until her slender arms began to tremble from the weight of it.

“Still waitin’ on a ‘thank you for not makin’ me walk to Wyoming, Joel’,” he smirked.

“Okay. I see how it is. For some reason, you’ve clearly decided to leave all your stuff here on the side of the road then,” she said, setting the pack down by the bike and climbing up to the high seat behind him. She rested her small hands on his shoulders. “Traveling light, eh? Bold move, Joel. But I bet you’re gonna miss your can opener when dinner time gets here.”

Joel leaned down to lift the heavy pack off the ground. He worked his arms through the straps and adjusted it across his back. Ellie leaned back on her seat, making room for him to work.

“Sounds to me like some smart mouth kid is about to go without dinner tonight,” he grumped affectionately.

“Taking me through sewers, making me ride on wooden pallets, getting me drunk at the Motel 6, and now making me do a tightrope walk across the Wabash River,” she tisked, clucking her tongue and shaking her head sorrowfully. “Man, when I give my report to the Fireflies, you’ll be lucky if they don’t _charge you_ for this trip.”

He chuckled and flipped up the kickstand. “Careful, you little smart ass. You’re gonna be going without breakfast too, you keep this shit up.”

“Malnourishing the salvation of humanity, Joel,” she teased, placing her hands on his waist as they pulled away from the decaying bridge. “History is going to frown on you for that too. Big time.”

 

* * *

 

“Are we in Illinois yet?” she asked, her high voice half-swallowed by the wind.

“Almost,” he said.

They were passing an old farming supply store of some sort. Ellie marveled at the giant tractors with sealed cabins and tires taller than Joel.

_Man, if we had one of those, we could ride up in that cab, safe and sound, and just squish the shit out of anybody who fucked with us._

“There it is,” Joel said.

She looked. Ahead, dotted in rust and faded by the sun was a sign.

                 WELCOME TO  
                     ILLINOIS  
          THE LAND OF LINCOLN

“Lincoln? Like Bill’s town?” she asked.

“Town’s named for Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “He was born here.”

“Oh! He was one of the presidents, right? Freed slaves and stuff?” Ellie’s military-focused education had only given her the barest bones of her almost-gone country’s history. Most of what she knew she had taught herself with old books she had scrounged up. She would be the first to admit there were large gaps in her knowledge.

“That’s the guy,” Joel said. “Won the Civil War. He’s on the penny too.”

“He is? Cool,” Ellie said. There was no use for money in the quarantine zones. She had once had a small collection of coins in her room, in a little bag on the bookshelf she and Riley had shared. The bag of worthless currency had almost certainly been seized as contraband by now. She remembered the small, thin coin she used to unscrew the cover of the electrical outlet in the corner of the room, the place in the wall where she kept certain things hidden in case of room inspections. “So who’s on the dime?”

“Uhh…” Joel tried to remember the face on the little coin. He hadn’t handled any money for twenty years. It had no value anymore except to curious people like Ellie. “Shit. Gerald Ford for all I remember, kid.”

“Cool. Did he free some slaves too? Or win a war or something?” You had to do something important to get your face on money, obviously. She wanted to know more.

“He fought the Space Invaders back in the late 70s, back before I was born,” Joel smiled. “My uncle Mario told me all about it. They came from some place called Atari to steal all our quarters. But President Ford gave ‘em the Pac-Man fever and got all our quarters back. Didn’t you learn about this in history class?”

“Uh huh. I’m sure that would be so fucking funny if I had any idea what the hell you were talking about, Old Timer,” she groused sweetly in his ear.

He laughed loudly, a sound she rarely heard. It warmed her all the way to the tips of her fingers despite the chill wind. She hardly missed Kristi Chau’s old denim jacket at all.

 

* * *

 

Lunch consisted of leftover breakfast, wrapped in old, wrinkled aluminum foil that had been used too many times already.

“Thih stuhh ih cabbah? Rehheh?” she asked, her mouth full of a cold mixture of cubed Spam and sauerkraut, her fingers wet with the same.

“Ellie,” he grumbled. “C’mon now. Don’t make me say it again.”

He’d already said it half a dozen times in the last fifteen minutes. He said it every time they sat down to eat. He always said it, but he never got mad about it. Not really mad, anyway. She grinned, still chewing. Mealtime was a great time to talk to him. She had his attention as they sat on the banks of the flowing river. She had him all to herself, so she had to talk to him. They were friends and that’s what friends did: they talked. She and Riley had talked all the time. Sometimes they talked about the really deep and important stuff. Sometimes they even got naked before they talked. Well, _mostly_ naked. She wanted to talk to Joel like that too. She had her shoes and socks off, airing out her sneakers, which had been soaked the day before. Barefoot with him, relaxing in the grass. Not naked with him, making love in the grass, but it was a start.

She swallowed the last big bite of her lunch. She was not one to take small bites. “Sorry, Joel. I was asking if this stuff was really cabbage. I had cabbage a bunch back in the QZ, but it was purply, not yellow, and it didn’t taste anything like this.”

“It’s fermented. Changes the flavor,” Joel explained, looking back over his shoulder, his eyes on road leading back towards the abandoned little town they had driven through a half-mile before. They had found a little gas there, but no supplies, and no survivors. A few infected had been heard, but none of them came out to the meet the strangers passing through their town. He knew that he and Ellie were probably safe here, for a while. So long as they didn’t linger on the bank of this river too long. Another half an hour or so, tops. He glanced at the sun, tried to guess the time.

“Fermented? Like beer?” she asked, her interest suddenly piqued. “You’re feeding me beer cabbage? Joel! Shame on you! Are you trying to get me drunk?”

The implication was not lost on Joel. Before this morning, before he heard her groan his name while in the grip of a dirty dream, he would have told himself that her words were completely innocent. But now he knew better. She wanted him and he knew it. He shifted a little in the grass, pulling one leg up to hide a sudden swelling across the front of his jeans.

“Zip it, little girl,” he groused, pointedly reminding both of them of her age.

“Better not be mean to me, buddy,” she said, getting up and working her way down the bank cautiously, foil in hand, ready to be rinsed off and used yet again. “Or else I’m going to tell Marlene that you got me hooked on this stuff! She’s gonna have words for you, buddy.”

Joel crossed his arms and took another look at the Gold Wing parked up on the bridge. He sighed, a little irritated with her. “You wanna hit the road right now? Or do you want to hush up and enjoy this break for a little longer?”

“Fine, fine,” she soothed, rolling her eyes, pushing her jeans up to her knees and stepping into the cool waters of the river. The smooth rocks were cold beneath her feet. “Be that way.”

She dunked the foil into the swiftly moving water between her calves. The river was flowing fast from the recent rain, and Joel tried not to look at her, tried not to think about her. He kept his eyes on what little remained of the Spam and sauerkraut in his crinkled bowl of foil. He picked at it with his fingers, chewing it thoughtfully, and doing his best to ignore her as she came up the hill, singing happily.

“Shake it, shake it, sugar,” she crooned, shaking water droplets from the foil in her hands, smiling with each step, her eyes fixed on him, her bare feet sliding through the grass with soft whispers that were almost swallowed up by the sound of the river behind her. “Shake it like a Polaroid picture…”

She grinned at him and reached out to take his empty foil. She was happy to wash it for him. She was happy to help. She continued to sing, her body moving subtly to the music she was making. Her slender finger motioned to the empty, dirty foil in his lap. She could have just as easily been pointing at something else.

He wanted to pull her down to him, wrap his arms around her small waist, roll her over onto the grass, and silence her with a deep, long kiss.

He handed her his empty foil instead.

“You know what to do,” she sang, returning to the river, unaware of his gaze following the side to side swing of her hips as the music flowed from her, sinuous and replenishing, like the Vermillion River she stepped into. “Hey ya! Oh oh! Hey ya!”

 

* * *

 

The red motorcycle idled on the edge of the road.

“Are we sending out an away team?”

“A what?”

“You know, a team to investigate that mysterious wreck, Captain.”

_How the fuck have you never seen Star Trek?_

Joel shot her a quick, quizzical look and returned his attention to the once brightly painted, now sun-faded vehicle, parked just off the road, resting slightly nose down on the gentle incline of the bank overlooking a small, shallow creek. The tires had dry-rotted away but the glass of the windows was still intact. The old step van was maybe three hundred feet from the blacktop, connected to the gently sloping grassy bank by an old gravel lane so overgrown with weeds that it was more trail than road anymore. He studied the seemingly intact vehicle, the unkempt and decaying path connecting it to the highway, and weighed the risk of laying the bike over and the effort it would take to get it back on its wheels versus the happiness that old van might bring to one particularly dedicated navigation officer.

“Screw it,” he sighed, and lowered the bike into first gear.

“We’re going over there? What is it? An ice cream truck or something?” she asked, gripping the straps of his backpack tightly as the Honda bounced and wobbled along the decrepit gravel road at a speed so slow she could have easily outpaced it on foot.

_Fuck, I’d almost kill somebody for some ice cream right now. It’s been years since I had any. Even Cherry couldn’t get her hands on any ice cream. And she had keys to almost every pantry and locker in the mess hall and the officer’s dining facility._

“Even better,” Joel said. “Keep watch now. Just in case. Those weeds are pretty tall.”

“‘Kay.”

_I wonder what the heck that is? There aren’t any pictures of ice cream and stuff on the side. And nobody would paint an army truck blue like that. Weird._

As they drew closer, Ellie jostled about in her seat, shotgun in hand, and studied the old blue van intently. There were words painted on the side, the red paint almost faded away to nothing from twenty years of sunlight, but they were there nonetheless. She read them aloud, quietly, as they bumped and swayed their way towards the thing.

“It’s a… great… day… for reading…” she whispered, her sharp eyes picking out the almost gone words one letter at a time,” Fountain County… Library… Bookmobile.”

_Book-mo-what?_

Inside the helmet, she grinned and tried not to get her hopes up.

**. . .**   


Twenty years of grime surrendered its hold on the old glass windshield with a long, almost comical, series of squeaks. Helmet still on her head, visor raised, Ellie peered in through the glass. Behind her, Joel shined his light in, illuminating the interior of the van.

“Holy shit!” Ellie gasped, her eyes widening with wonder. She grinned and looked back at Joel. “You weren’t kidding!”

“Wouldn’t lie to you, Ellie,” he said wryly. “That’s a genuine bookmobile.”

_Oh man. This is incredible. It’s like a little library in there!_

Joel clicked his light off and walked around to the side door, behind the driver’s compartment. He tried the handle. Locked. He checked the other doors. All locked.

Who would leave this parked by a creek, with the damn doors locked? he wondered.

“Locked? All of them?” Ellie asked, still looking in the through the clean spot on the windshield.

“Yeah.” He drew his .45 from the holster on his hip. “But the door on the side here’s got a pretty flimsy lock.”

_Sweet! I can’t believe he stopped for this. I really owe him one._

_Yes, you do, Bad Ellie. Maybe you could play with his dick later. I bet he’d like that._

_Shh! You’re Bad Ellie. I’m Good Ellie._

_If you were really good, Good Ellie, you wouldn’t spend so much time thinking about him kissing you and being naked with him and shit like that._

_I’m trying not to! Okay? It’s not my fault he’s so hot._

Ellie jogged over to him, still grinning. “Man, Joel. I really owe you one.”

“You sure do, Red.”

_See? What did I tell you? He wants a blowjob._

_God, I’d do it if he’d let me._

_Every man wants a blowjob, Not-So-Good Ellie._

Ellie remembered Riley, backlit against the night sky, kneeling in front of Montego, her mouth taking him in as he groaned, leaning back against the low wall that ringed the edge of the dormitory roof. She remembered the rough surface of the roof so hard and unpleasant against her own knees as she secretly watched her older friend do things that the thirteen-year-old Ellie had only barely understood at the time. It had been very educational, and not the first time she had snuck up here to wait in the shadows for Riley and her boyfriend to meet for a romantic rendezvous.

_I could suck him like she did. I could suck him and make him make the same noises Montego did. I’m sure I could. I watched Riley do it a few times. I know what to do…Fuck, I could suck his dick and make him come… If he’d just let me do it… Shit, I’d even let him come on my face if he wanted to._

_That’s what they all want, boo. You let him do that and he’ll be yours forever._

She blinked the thought away and kept her smile from growing too large. She knew she had to be smooth about this stuff and wait for the right moment.

“Try not to hit any pun books on the other side, okay?”

“How’d you guess my plan?” he said, ignoring the light punch she gave his arm. “Stand back now, girl.”

The shot was loud, echoing across the empty field and along the creek. Joel knew that it would draw attention. There was a farmhouse just down the road, and two more not far behind them, with big barns perfect for growing fungus. Ellie would have to be quick.

**. . .**   


Inside the old bookmobile, Ellie dashed from shelf to shelf, scanning covers, trying to find something for Joel. She already had a few books for herself, none of them pun books, tragically. There were more books scattered across the floor. She would check those last. They were covered with small basketball sneaker footprints – a mystery for someone to solve at a later date, no doubt.

_Man, it smells so great in here. So many old books. Fuck, I wish I had more time._

She held up a paperback copy of something called ‘The Hunt For Red October’. It had a cool embossed cover, but it didn’t look like something Joel would read. No problem. There were still shelves full of books to choose from.

_Books on wheels. Ice cream on wheels. Pizza on wheels (whatever the hell pizza is). Everything on wheels, I guess. You could bring your ice cream truck to a drive-in theater and watch a movie while you ate dessert. Shit. What kind of world did he live in? Shit, I wish I’d had a chance to see it. It’s not fair, damn it._

“So they just drove this thing up to people’s houses and let them pick out books?” Her voice echoed slightly inside the dim confines of the bookmobile. “That’s so crazy awesome!”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Joel said from outside, the Winchester ready, his eyes scanning the field and the nearby highway. The Honda was still idling a few feet away. He only killed the engine for lunch breaks and camping now. The old battery was fading with each start of the motor. “Hurry up in there, Ellie. We’re burnin’ gas. We gotta get movin’ again.”

_Hold your horses! It’s been, like, three minutes._

“Almost done,” she said, her efforts becoming more frantic. She swung her flashlight around, stabbing through the gloom, looking for the perfect book for him. She knew this was her last warning before he ordered her out. She had a firm grasp on the various tones of his voice now. This was his ‘yellow alert’ tone. He was almost but not quite out of patience. ‘Red alert’ was coming soon.

_I’m doing this for you, you butt head. You’ll thank me later, I promise._

She held up something with cowboys and horses on the cover. She read the title. It sounded silly to her, but she didn’t have much time left.

His voice drifted in from the daylight outside.

“Alright, Ellie. Come on out of there. We gotta shake a leg.”

_Hope you like it, Joel._

**. . .**   


Two clickers were on the move. They had staggered out of the shabby remains of a farmhouse just almost a mile down the road while Ellie was still inside the bookmobile, the cordyceps in their brains drawn by the sound of the gunfire. Joel had watched them coming, making their way across the field towards the gravel road and little creek, jerking and shrieking, sure that prey of some sort was in this general direction, somewhere around the source of the low, loping motorcycle engine. He and Ellie were still too far away for their echolocation to find, but not for much longer. The sound of the Honda was slowly pulling them in like a fish on a line.

“C’mon, Ellie,” he hissed, not willing to use any of the few rifle rounds left to him unless he had no other choice.

She closed the door of the bookmobile as tightly as she could, sealing the books safely inside for the same reason he had seen to the long-term safety of the old Camaro back in East Liberty: this was a treasure to valuable to leave to the elements.

_I hope I can come back for the rest of you guys one day._

She dashed across the grass and climbed up behind him. He handed her the rifle and she slung it from the high peak behind her seat, draping it alongside the shotgun and the semi-automatic rifle he had found at Fort Overpass a few days before. She patted his shoulder, her eyes on the clickers bumbling towards them, maybe a hundred feet away now.

_Fuck! Where did those things come from?_

”Go go go!” she said, forgetting to keep her voice low.

The clickers cast about in her direction, seeking her out with sonar. Joel revved the idling bike into life and began to maneuver the big Gold Wing back up the poor excuse for a gravel road, towards the beckoning safety of the highway. If they could reach the blacktop, they would be safe. But the untended, half-eroded gravel lane wasn’t the sort of terrain the touring motorcycle was made for. He had to go slow or else one bad slip, one deep rut, and the almost half-ton bike would lay over on it side and it would take too long to get it up on its wheels again.

The clickers shrieked at the sound of the revving engine. The sound was moving now, away from the gentle babbling of the creek. Moving meant life. Life meant prey. Cordyceps told them what to do.

They were old clickers, well on their way to becoming bloaters one day. Their limbs weren’t as fast as they had been, but the fungus was threaded throughout their body, lending strength to knotty, corded muscles. The fungal plates growing out from their bifurcated heads and sprouting along their shoulders and upper body easily deflected the brief hailstorm of bullets Ellie sent their way.

_Reload! Reload! Gotta reload!_

Ellie stuffed the empty magazine down the front of her shirt and fished a fresh one from her pocket. She slapped it in and took aim again.

She poured all her fire into the nearest monster, the one reaching for them with cracked yellow talons. Chunks of fungus flew from its face. It recoiled, staggering backwards. She dumped the empty magazine into her shirt again, and tossed the small pistol in after it. Swinging freely from her shoulder by a homemade leather strap, the shotgun found its way into her hands. She triggered off a barrel and the head of the thrashing thing exploded, spraying rotting flesh, cracked bone, and infested brain all over its companion, lurching along just behind it. She was aiming the remaining barrel at the head of the second clicker when she felt the bike lurch. With a short squeal of rubber on asphalt, the Honda rolled onto the highway and Joel opened the throttle. The lonely clicker was quickly left standing in the road, furious and forgotten.

_Now it’s gonna be alone forever. I probably should have killed it too._

 

* * *

 

The corners of the map fluttered in the wind and it threatened to fold over on itself again. Joel held it down again with a grimace. He didn’t have enough hands to hold this damn thing in place on the hood of this old Mercury and show Ellie the route he needed her to memorize before they climbed back on the idling Honda again.

“Here. North on Country Road 2100… and then west here, on Country Road 3300…” he said, the other corner of the map rising up as the wind shifted. “Goddamnit.”

She mistook his irritation with the wind as annoyance with her. She was quick to trace the path on the map, away from US 136, up and around the city of Rantoul and the big Air Force base there. Her eyes were large when she looked up at him for confirmation.

“Like this?” she asked. “To keep us away from the army base?”

“Air Force,” he snapped, fumbling with the map. It wasn’t her fault. She had never known a time when the various branches of the military weren’t all folded into a single US Army under FEDRA command.

She winced. “Sorry. Sorry. Air Force. Right.”

He noticed her distress and tried to work a little kindness into his voice. “That’s right. Chanute Air Force Base. This old map says that it’s decommissioned, and this was printed back before the outbreak, so it’s been abandoned a long time, probably. But every base had a big fence or a wall around it. It would be a great place for hunters to set up camp. So we keep goin’ down 3330 until we get here.”

She looked at his finger on the flapping, uncooperative map.

“County Road 200,” she said firmly, looking at him to let him know she was following every step of this detour, memorizing it like the awesome navigator she was, the great sidekick she needed him to appreciate.

“Right,” he said, tapping the map for emphasis as he showed their route to her. “This way’ll take us past Chanute… around Rantoul… and past these little towns of Foosland… and Fisher too… before we get back on 136, way over here. Then we haul ass until we’re quit of this whole mess. At least a good seventy or eighty miles. We don’t stop for anything until we get to McLean or San Jose, at least.”

“San Jose? California?” Her face lit up. She had read about San Jose in her old copy of The Wall Street Journal. “Surfing?”

“Not California, kiddo. Different San Jose. Nowhere near the beach.”

“Oh,” her face fell a bit. She made a small circle on the map, indicating the area that was just a few miles down the road from where they were. “This area isn’t a safe to look for gas or supplies?”

“Not around here,” he said, folding the map and handing it to her. “You can bet that back durin’ the outbreak and for a few years after, that Air Force base right there drew a lot of refugees. Shanty towns sprung up all over here, I’ll bet.”

“Shanty towns draw infected,” she nodded, remembering his words.

“Right. I’ll bet all these places on the map are crawlin’ with clickers and bloaters.”

“Scary,” she said, close at his heels as he strode to the idling bike. “Yeah, good idea. I vote we go around too.”

He helped her up on the bike, trying hard to be nice to her. He had snapped at her without cause so he tried a reassuring smile now.

“I knew I made the right call makin’ you my navigator.”

She smiled, flipped down her visor, and tucked the map into the pouch on his backpack for easy access later. She nodded her helmeted head at him and saluted crisply.

“Ready for takeoff, Captain.”

 

* * *

 

Havana, Illinois had been bombed all to hell. The bridge there was almost as bad as the one they had used to cross the Wabash River earlier that day. The city was barely passable and filled with enough infected that even with the speed of the bike to carry them through the ruins and the shrieking horde, it had been a very near thing. She had been even more disappointed to learn that the haunted city they passed through wasn’t the same Havana that had been the bad guys headquarters in ‘Invasion USA’.

But that was all behind them now. Safely hidden off the road in the lush expanse of the north end of the Emiquon National Wildlife Refuge, Joel was breaking down the small camp stove while Ellie returned from the banks of the pond where she had washed their mess kits clean. Her jeans were pushed up to her knees again, her feet swishing in the grass as she approached, humming a song he thought he should recognize but couldn’t.

Joel put the stove away and carefully unwrapped something in his pack: an apple – the last of the ones they had gathered in that forgotten orchard back in Ohio. He remembered how miserable Ellie had looked when he found her sitting up by the cold remains of their campfire, her head soaked from the rain that had blown through during the night, wrapped up inside her poncho, looking for all the world like a sad, lost kitten that had shown up on his doorstep. She’d had a terrible nightmare, she’d told him. He knew all about those. He had let her sleep in that day, let her wear one of his shirts, tried not to notice how bare her legs were, tried not to catch glimpses of the curly auburn hair down there that peeked out at him when she sat down to eat lunch and later dinner. They’d spent all day in camp instead of traveling. He’d told himself that it was because she needed the rest, and because they’d seen that patrol out of Cleveland the day before. He told himself they were hiding in that orchard because laying low was the smart thing to do. The truth of it was he’d let her run around camp all day half-dressed like that because he liked how she looked in his shirt.

I’m a rotten old pervert on a fast track to hell, he told himself as she sat down beside him.

“Oh man, Joel! You’ve got an apple left! Let’s split it!” she gushed sweetly, trying to manipulate him with the endearing tone of her voice. “Okay? Please?”

“We each had four apples, Ellie. Did you already eat all of yours? ‘Cause I believe this one here is one of mine.”

She spluttered adorably, her mind racing for a way to convince him that she deserved her fair share of his apple. It was the only apple left. So it was really _their_ apple when you stopped to think about it.

“But… uh… fuh…” she stammered before finally settling on a plaintive, heartfelt, “ _Plleeeeeaassseeee???_ ”

Joel chuckled and tossed her the apple.

“Cut it up for us. But clean that damn knife of yours first, girl.”

“Pfft,” she snorted, wiping her blade in an alcohol-soaked old towel. “You and your fear of cordyceps. Wuss. You don’t hear me complaining about it.”

She cut the apple into slices as he packed away his mess kit. He eased off his boots and sat them beside her sneakers. The air rushing over them as they had ridden along the highway had finally dried the last of yesterday’s rain from their shoes.

Here in their cozy camp between the thick clusters of trees overlooking the little pond, the breeze was warm, but it would turn cool before long. It was getting a little colder every night now. Joel had his shirt off and would keep it off for a little while longer, at least until the warming rays of the sun had disappeared and the colder night air began to blanket their little camp. Ellie wanted to take her shirt off too.

_I can’t believe a guy is having this effect on me. And he’s an old guy too! Maybe that’s why the boys at the school never affected me like this, not like the way they did for Riley._

_Maybe I just prefer older men?_

_God, I hope he prefers younger women._

“Who do you think left the warning about the hunters?” she asked, trying to think of something that didn’t turn her on so much. “The big red letters outside that town?”

“Probably somebody who learned about them the hard way.” He leaned back on the soft grass and stared up at the sky. The sun was just starting to set, turning the many ponds and lakes here into a rippling quilt of sparking lights. The green leaves of summer were going gold as autumn stole across the countryside. It was beautiful here. Almost as pretty as the girl sitting close to him.

Damn it, he thought. Why do I keep looking at her like that? She’s just a damn kid. I got no right looking at a little girl like that… even if she does want…

He grimaced and scratched his chest, trying to think about anything other than her.

She handed him almost half of the apple slices. “The hard way? Like when Henry’s group wandered into Pittsburgh?”

“Somethin’ like that, yeah.” He idly munched on the fruit and tried not to look as Ellie licked the sweet juice from her delicate fingers, tried not to watch her small, pink tongue darting and lapping at her slick, sticky fingertips, savoring every drop.

Jesus, give me strength, he wished. A familiar prayer lately.

She sighed, a mixture of the contentment that comes from a full belly and the bittersweet memories of friends she couldn’t forget. “… I miss Henry. He was nice. Sam too.”

“Ellie.” His tone was cautioning, almost routine.

“What? It’s true. I miss them, Joel.”

“Hush.”

“Fine.” She wasn’t happy, but she knew how it had to be. He had taught her that. The past stays buried. The last of the apple slices gone, she wiped her fingers in the grass near her hip.

_But don’t you miss them too? Don’t you miss Tess? Don’t you miss anyone?_

She stood up and spread her blanket out on the grass. She unzipped her jeans and began to shimmy out of them. Joel raised one leg for the same reason he always did lately.

_Would you miss me?_

“Can I borrow one of your shirts to sleep in tonight?” she asked idly, folding her jeans, her knees close together, her white panties peering out from beneath the hem of her long-sleeved ‘Steve Miller Band’ shirt.

_Or would I be one more thing you don’t talk about?_

“Sure,” Joel said, raising his leg a little higher. “Got a clean one in my pack.”

_I want you to remember me, Joel. Or even better, I want you to ask me to stay when the time comes._

“Cool. Thanks, Old Timer.”

_I want you to need me the way I need you. I want you to ask me to stick around._

_What do I have to do to encourage you to do that? To get you to see me like that?_

She dropped to all fours next to him to rummage through his stuff. He wondered if she was pointing her bottom at him on purpose, the curves of her backside only barely concealed beneath a layer of thin cotton. He suspected he knew the answer. If he could have seen how much her hands were shaking, how deeply she was blushing, he would have known for certain.

_I want you, Joel. Don’t you want me too?_

Oh Jesus, give me strength. I can’t raise my knee up any higher than I am without looking like a damn chorus girl or something.

_Turn me over your knee and spank me, damn it._

**. . .**   


Ellie had gone unspanked, much to her annoyance. But she managed to conceal her disappointment in her older partner well. She was patient, much more than he expected a teenager could be. She could wait him out. Wait until he saw her the same way she saw him: with a burning, sexual need. Wait until he was ready to share that sleeping bag with her. She was certain of it. It made her smile.

She had no idea the effect the sight of her body was having on him, but she had hope. When he had gone down to the pond to fill his canteen, she had slipped off her panties and her bra, stuffing them into her backpack before he returned. Now she waited, hoping he would notice, dying for him to notice, scared shitless that he would notice.

He sat cross-legged to hide his hard cock, idly whittling at a piece of wood with his Old Timer knife, giving his eyes no choice but to watch the razor sharp blade working close tot his fingers rather than look at the half-naked girl lying just a few feet away, warming herself by their small campfire.

She was wearing his green flannel shirt and nothing else, lying on her stomach, her bare calves up in the air, feet kicking idly at the cool night air as she studied the map, flashlight in one hand, measuring distances with her finger.

“What are you doin', Ellie?”

“Shh! I’m doing math!”

A moment passed. The cooling breeze played over both of them. She shivered cutely.

“Brrrrr.”

He thought about putting on a shirt, but she was wearing the last clean one he had.

She looked up at him, her face soft and lovely in the light of the campfire, her expression one of joy. “Wow! We covered about two hundred miles today! That’s a record! Right?”

“It sure is,” he nodded, his eyes on this whittling, pointedly not looking at the girl’s bottom and the swells of her bare cheeks that were almost covered by the hem of his shirt. Almost covered. But not quite.

The shirt had ridden up quite a bit earlier, when she had wiggled into a comfortable position close to the fire. She needed to tug it down, cover herself, but he hadn’t said anything. Because it would be awkward to broach the topic with her? Or because he wanted to keep looking at her half-exposed ass? He didn’t want to think about it. He focused on his whittling instead and tried to talk to her without looking at her. He couldn’t trust his eyes.

“Not bad for movin’ no more’n thirty miles an hour or so. Add in the time we spent with all the scavengin’ we did too. We must’ve spent six or seven full hours drivin’ today, I’ll bet.”

“Is that about what you and Tommy managed back in the day?”

She scooted around on her stomach just a little to better be able to look him in the face while she spoke. The green flannel twisted around her hips, revealing even more of her backside. She felt the cool night air slipping into the crack of her ass and pretended she had no idea that any of her flesh was on display. She didn’t know quite how much of herself was out there to be seen.

“Oh hell no, kid. Back then the roads were smooth and solid and you didn’t have steer around old cars or trees stickin’ up through the pavement. And you didn’t have to stop to siphon gas every few hours either. You could just buy it anywhere and pump it right into your tank. You could roll along doin’ sixty or seventy miles an hour, easy. And ride for as long as you wanted, even after it got dark. You didn’t have to worry about ambushes or anything like that.”

“Wow. Cool,” She grinned. They were talking now. Really talking.

She rolled onto her side, the bound up green flannel tight around her body, revealing a fair amount of her red curls to him. Her eyes widened for one terrifying heartbeat when she felt the chilly sensation the breeze lavished across her exposed sex. She was afraid to look down. She tried to make her face as impassive as possible while she gently tugged at the hem of her borrowed shirt, discretely trying to cover herself. It budged only a little. Her pussy was still on display. She feigned remaining calm. Her eyebrow twitched. Despite the cool air around her, a single bead of sweat formed on her forehead.

Joel could see her out of the corner of his eye. He began to work the blade backwards along the wood, making it seem as though he were still carving, but only pantomiming it now. He didn’t trust himself not to slip and cut one of his fingers to the bone.

He swallowed and inhaled sharply, trying not to see, but unable to stop himself from taking in as much of her as he could from the edge of his vision. “Sure. Back then, you and me coulda ridden from Pittsburgh to Jackson in just two or three days, no problem.”

“Man. That must have been so cool.”

She slid her top leg forward just a bit, trying to conceal herself a little. She tried to lift her hip off the ground by the merest centimeter, hoping to free the twisted green flannel. But it was no good. She was almost certain that quite a bit of her auburn fringed sex remained on display. She didn’t dare look down, didn’t want to see how her triangle of red hair was peeking out from the crease of her thighs. Her freckled face was the very picture of innocence. She was praying he wouldn’t say anything. She pressed her open hand firmly along her thigh to keep her fingers from shaking. Her head rested in the cup of her other hand. She had never showed herself to anyone so brazenly. Riley had seen her naked, of course. But it had been different with Riley. Safer. More familiar. Joel was a man, a stranger, older, more experienced. Her heart was racing. She could feel herself blushing. She bit her bottom lip. He wasn’t looking at her. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything yet. Maybe he hadn’t seen _it_. She tugged slyly but fruitlessly at the hem again.

“Yep,” Joel said, his voice on slightly unsteady, his eyes still on that damned lump of wood in his hand. “Let’s hope these roads stay as good as they were today. We don’t need more of that busted up shit like we drove over back in Ohio.”

“How far do you think we are from Boston by now?” she asked, her voice quavering slightly despite her valiant efforts to steady it.

She laid her head in the crook of her arm. She slid her top leg forward, until one knee was resting in front of the other. In the flickering firelight, lively shadows played across the hint of glossy red curls that peered out above the curve of her obscuring thigh. He stopped pretending to shape the wood. He pressed the back of the blade against the chunk of butternut he had picked up in Ohio. He held the shape tightly in his hand and kept his eyes everywhere but the one place he wanted to look.

“Oh, Jesus…” he muttered. “Umm… I’d say a thousand miles, easy.”

“WOW! A _thousand_ miles… So fucking cool.” Her voice was almost breathless. She turned her topmost hip slightly forward, as through she were simply trying to get comfortable and not angling herself to conceal something. The glow of the campfire brought warm highlights to the few dark red curls that stubbornly insisted on remaining visible to him.

“That’s in a straight line, mind you,” he said, his voice almost imperceptibly strained. “It’s a lot more if you think about all the curves and stuff.”

Carefully keeping his erection hidden, he turned at the waist and leaned over to put the wood back in his pack. He took out one of the red shop cloths she had found in that garage and wiped his hands with it.

Ellie used that moment of distraction to roll onto her stomach as nonchalantly as possible. The fabric of the shirt twisted a little more around her body as she did and she was pretty sure that at least two-thirds of her butt was being showcased in the yellow-orange light of the campfire, but she didn’t care. As much as she wanted him to see her pussy one day, she wasn’t quiet ready to be so brazen about it. Not yet, anyway. But he could look at her butt, she decided. That was a little safer.

She sighed, her cheek resting on the green flannel, her eyes soft and warm, her red bush safely hidden away now. She seemed to him to be as content as a kitten.

“I gotta tell you, Joel… I never thought I’d get this far from that place. From Boston, you know?”

“You miss it?” He risked a quick look at her, making sure to keep his eyes on her face. Her lovely face. Her adoring face. Her face… and her ass. But his eyes only darted there briefly. Just long enough to see. But probably long enough for Ellie to know for sure that he had seen her. He hated himself at that moment.

“Well… Kind of. Sometimes. Is.. is that weird?” Now that she had caught that quick flicker of his eyes, so unlike the steady gaze he had held on the wood in his hand earlier, she told herself that he had only seen her bottom and not anything else. He didn’t see _anything_ else, she reassured herself. He didn’t see _that_. She smiled coyly.

“I reckon not,” he shrugged. “It’s your home. Gettin’ a little homesick is natural.”

“Oh, okay… So what I’m… feeling…right now… it isn’t, you know… strange. It’s perfectly natural. Right?” She was asking about two different things, she realized.

“Yeah,” he sighed and put the red towel away. His voice was heavy, husky. He was answering two different questions, he suspected. “It’s natural… I guess.”

“Cool.” She sounded pleased, and for two reasons.

Joel looked up at the stars and hoped like hell that somebody up there would help him. Not for his sake, but for the girl. He had to do right by her, no matter what she thought she wanted. He had to be the adult here. He had to do the right thing.

After a while, as the night turned colder, Ellie wrapped herself up in her blanket, hiding her bare legs and mostly bare bottom, mercifully giving Joel a little peace of mind. He had a hard time falling asleep that night. Ellie on the other hand, was sleeping like a baby in no time, happy and content, dreaming the best sort of dreams.

**. . .**   


Just before dawn, as he was lying in his sleeping bag, staring up at the fading stars and wondering how in the hell he was going to convince Tommy to take this girl off his hands before he did something to her that she wasn’t nearly as ready to do as she seemed to think she was, Ellie began to moan again. The soft, erotic sounds wove their way into his thoughts until he felt he might go mad from them.

“…oh… god….” she moaned, her voice faint, her body slowly twisting and squirming beneath her blanket.

Inside his sleeping bag, his hard cock throbbed and strained. It whispered to him, reminding him that the girl was old enough. Back in the days before modern civilization, girls her age were usually married by now. And just about always to older men. And civilization was long gone now, especially out here in the woods, where it was just the two of them. Nobody to see. Nobody to know. Nobody’s business. Just the two of them.

“…uhnnn… mmm…”

It was perfectly natural, his cock reminded him. Nature’s way. She’s old enough for sex now so she wants it. Simple as that. She’s ready for it. Listen to her! She _needs_ it. She needs a good… hard… fucking.

“… nnn…. ooohhhh…”

His blood burning for her, Joel sat up and dug around in his pack until he found the one thing that could bring him some relief. It had a million and one uses on the trail: knife sharpening, leather cleaning, unsticking a backpack zipper, waterproofing… and certain other uses too.

“… nnn… hhhhhh…” she groaned, her head tilted back, yielding herself to him in her dream. “… mmmm… ahh…”

Silently, he slipped out of their camp and found a safe spot in the tall grasses near the edge of the small pond. He was sick and he knew it, but he had to let some of the pressure out of this dam before it burst apart and something tragic happened.

“Forty-eight goddamned years old and I’m doin’ this first thing in the mornin’ again,” he muttered darkly. “And over a little girl… Christ almighty… what is _wrong_ with me?”

Guilty as he was, he didn’t stop himself. All of his thoughts were of her as he tugged down the stretched-tight front of his sweat pants, letting his hard, aching cock spring free into the cold, foggy morning air. He cursed softly and popped open the pink flip-top cap of the small bottle of baby oil.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I almost called this chapter “Scenes From The Road.” I wanted to show some of the smaller moments that Joel and Ellie have while traveling. I think it makes a nice contrast from the bigger adventures they have at specific locations.
> 
> Now to address a few points:
> 
> Abraham Lincoln was actually born in Kentucky. Joel didn’t pay much attention in history class.
> 
> Gerald Ford was the 38th president of the United States. He did not actually fight the space invaders from Taito. They didn’t reach our shores until 1979, so it was Jimmy Carter who was in power at the time of their landing. Joel wasn’t born until 1984 (in my timeline), so his understanding of the unrivaled glory that was the 1970s is imperfect.
> 
> The song Ellie is singing on the banks of the Vermillion River (just outside of Alvin, Indiana) is “Hey Ya!” by OutKast.
> 
> The bookmobile was originally going to have more of a backstory than it wound up with by the final draft. The vehicle was in the wrong state, and quite a ways from home. Joel and Ellie would have explored the nearby farm house and scrounged up some artifacts that told the story of the poor bookmobile driver. But it took up too much space in the chapter, dominating the otherwise breezy “road trip” story of this chapter. Sadly, it had to go. But that’s how it goes with first drafts.
> 
> And that’s it for this chapter. We’ll give Joel a little privacy while he jacks off to fantasies of Ellie before she wakes up. We’ll check back on Saturday when our heroes go looking for gasoline and other treasures in Chapter Eleven: Better Than Any Bank.


	11. Better Than Any Bank

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel and Ellie have a big adventure in a small town. A quiet, safe spot to rest is found. Hugging is a thing that happens. Clothing is removed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick word about future updates: I have a plane to catch early tomorrow morning and I’ll be out of town for a week. That means that there won’t be any updates until I get back from this trip.
> 
> The next chapter of this story will be posted on October 8th.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 11 – Better Than Any Bank**

 

_They were holding me down, four big alien bad guys, one at each wrist and ankle. My arms and legs were spread wide. I was trying to get free… No, that’s not right. I was pretending to try to get free. I wanted him to think I wanted to escape… But I didn’t. I was glad I had been caught. But I didn’t want him to know that. I didn’t want to admit it to myself either._

_He caught me trying to sneak into his asteroid base. I got caught in a trap and then he had his guards hold me down while he took all my bounty hunter space armor off, one piece at a time. I was wearing some kind of white, skintight bodysuit on underneath the armor. Like a scuba suit, sort of. But much clingier and made out of some kind of super thin material. It was so tight that it was practically painted on, like in a comic book or something._

_He used one of the scary knives from my utility belt to cut me out of it._

_Right there, in front of all his henchmen and his slave girls. He cut that suit off me… with my own knife… slowly… until everyone could see me… naked… and helpless._

Ellie shifted slightly on the back seat of the Gold Wing, remembering the dream from the night before, her mind sorting the jumble of erotic images into something approaching a coherent narrative, filling in gaps where necessary. For the last week or so, she’d been crafting the story of L. E. Novastarr, galactic bounty hunter turned slave girl, into a nice series of dirty day dreams to entertain herself on the road, but this was the first time that she had actually dreamed about it while she was asleep. Her waking mind was more organized in how it put the story together, but her sleeping brain was much, much more explicit, daring to go places that she was hesitant to explore while awake.

_His men held me down while he shaved my pussy with that knife._

_I had been squirming and struggling before. But once he placed that razor sharp edge against my pussy, I got very quiet and very still. I stopped shouting cuss words and started whimpering instead. It made him smile to see me like that. I was so scared and turned on when he started to shave me._

Ellie shifted about again. The vibrations of the Honda were again reaching out to her in ways that made it hard to think.

_Fuck, I was so wet while he did that. I could see it on the blade. The hair was sticking to the knife because it was coated with my pussy juice._

_When he’d shaved it all off, he ran his fingers over it. My pussy was baby soft and smooth. It felt so good. I groaned. I couldn’t help myself._

_He put a finger inside me. It went right in, no problem. I was so wet. I groaned really loudly and started to squirm. All his men laughed and the slave girls leaned in to watch._

The teenager adjusted her position on the seat yet again, trying to find a place to sit that wouldn’t put her swollen, aching sex in contact with those hellishly wonderful tremors the engine made. But it was no use. She was turned on and getting hornier with each passing mile.

_Fuck, that was a hot dream. I’m getting wet just thinking about it._

_He rubbed my clit with his thumb and I was making all these crazy noises and he said everyone could see what a slutty whore I was. He said I loved being treated like that. I said I didn’t. But a wet pussy doesn’t lie, I guess. I wanted him to fuck me right there on the floor of that cargo pod… fuck me hard… with everyone watching…I was just about to come from the way he was rubbing my clit when he laughed and stopped. I groaned and whimpered. I didn’t want him to stop._

_He told them to take me to his private chambers and tie me to the bed. He told one of the slave girls to bring his finest leather whips._

Ellie shivered and blushed inside her helmet.

_Fffuuuuck… I wonder what was going to happen next?_

_But then I woke up and Joel was gone. I was worried and horny and I knew I should go look for him. But I was so horny. I wanted to hide under the blanket and rub one out first, and then go look for him. And that’s a pretty selfish fucking thing to do! But then he came back. He said he’d been down by the pond, taking a leak. He put something in his backpack, but I didn’t see what it was. TP, maybe? I was hoping he’d go back to sleep so I could play with myself. But he stayed up and started making breakfast, even though the sun wasn’t really up yet. And he was just ten feet away. Even I’m not THAT much of a ninja! So I had to get up to. And I never got a chance to get off, so now I’m crazy horny today. Super fucking crazy can’t sit still and about to pop if I don’t come soon horny._

Ellie sat back, as far back as she could manage, until her nylon pack was pressed into the frame of the high, rear seat. She pressed the soles of her shoes against the foot pegs and tried to discretely lift her bottom up from the gently vibrating seat cushion, denying her desperate, hot little mound the contact it was craving.

_Fuck! Okay… okay… That helps a little._

It wasn’t very comfortable, hovering an inch above the seat like this, but it helped her to clear her mind just a little.

_Damn it. Why couldn’t you just go back to sleep, Joel? Just for half an hour? Just long enough for me to get off? I would have been quick, I promise! Damn it! Why can’t you let a girl have a little alone time?_

The engine of the Honda began to wind down and Joel allowed the twistgrip of the throttle to rotate back to the idling position. Already, Ellie could feel the bike slowing down.

Ahead, beyond the line of trees framing the road with their green going to gold leaves, Ellie could see the edges of a small town rising up from the lush green horizon.

“We going to town?” she asked. Joel usually avoided driving through a town if he could avoid it.

“Not much choice, kiddo,” he said, never taking his eyes off the buildings that were drawing closer as the bike rolled along the shabby two-lane blacktop of what the map euphemistically called the Knox Highway. “We’re almost out of go juice.”

Ellie had watched him pour the contents of the emergency jug into the bike’s gas tank last night, as they were making camp in that old nature park.

_And that was…_

She tried to remember the map that she had studied this morning over breakfast, but it was fuzzy in her mind. She had been too horny at the time to give it her full attention.

_Forty miles ago? Fifty? … Umm… We got on the Knox Highway when we rode through that little town… umm… Maquon, I think? Or maybe it was Elmwood? I can’t remember?_

_Fuck, I should have been paying attention, not thinking about him shaving my pussy and stuff. God, I’m so stupid sometimes!_

“Keep your eyes open, Ellie,” he said, reaching back with his left hand to pat her knee.

“Sure thing, Joel.” She nodded for emphasis, but he wasn’t looking at her. His eyes were still on the town ahead, slowly growing larger before the coasting motorcycle.

_Pay attention, Ellie. Focus!_

_And stop being so fucking horny!_

She glanced at the sign as they passed it.

           ABINGDON  
            City Limit  
            Pop 3612

 

* * *

 

The sign had lied to her. This place was emptier than an orphan’s Christmas stocking. They had rolled through the town with the engine barely more than idling, wheels turning slowly, taking in as much as they could from the relative safety of the bike. Lonely, empty streets. Broken glass. Suitcases and duffel bags left on sidewalks, most of them open and rifled through. Empty brass shell casings here and there, but not in the quantities a full-blown battle would produce. Instead it seemed to be the result of scattered, unfocused violence done by desperate and scared people. Maybe there had been too many people trying to get into too few buses. Or maybe the buses never came and desperation turned to violence.

The ready-made sign with the nicely printed letters and the impressively big red arrow with a large space below that ready to be filled in with a grease pencil told the tale of at least an attempted rescue effort for these people.

 **MANDATORY EVACUATION NOTICE**  
                  Please follow the instructions of  
                authorities along evacuation route  
 **← ← ← ←**  
                     Evacuation Assembly Point:  
                _**Abingdon Senior High School**_

The sign was twenty years old, of course, faded and cracked by the sun. But the words were still there, still pointing towards a side street, still promising hope for salvation. It made Ellie melancholy to read it. She looked at other things instead.

There had been people here and they had erected barricades at some point, most likely after the evacuation effort. The barriers were ramshackle affairs, rusted and falling apart, made from old fences, sign posts, planks ripped up from the unaffordable luxury or porches, refrigerators gone useless after the power went out for good. The improvised barricades reminded her of the ones she had seen in Bill’s town. Those were still serviceable, still being maintained by that grumpy old bastard. But there were in terrible shape, long-neglected and more for show than protection at this point. Whoever had put these up way back then had been gone a long time by now.

“You watchin’?” Joel asked.

“Fuck yeah, I am. This place is creepy,” she said. “Where is everybody?”

“Long gone, I reckon,” he said. “No infected either. Least, none that I can see anyway.”

“Creepy,” she repeated, stuffing as much of the dread filling her chest into that single word as she could manage.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

 

* * *

 

They left the Honda parked on the other side of town, hidden behind the old, rotting remains of a church. It had been burned half to the ground, years and years ago, from the looks of it. The rock monument out front identified the place as having been the ‘First Assembly of God’ in those long ago, better days. Across that intricately inlaid stone, someone had spray painted ‘GOD IS DEAD’ in large, green, sloppy letters. In the otherwise empty parking lot, one of the mass-produced FEDRA signs rusted quietly away in the cradle of its wheeled trailer.

 **MANDATORY EVACUATION NOTICE**  
                 All residents of _Knox County_ and all  
            outlying areas are required to evacuate by  
 _6:00 pm 11 / 4 / 13_  
              **PLEASE FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS**  
 **OF DESIGNATED AUTHORITIES**

      All evacuees will be asked to provide identification  
          and may be subject to onsite medical testing.  
        Any evacuees resisting official directives will be  
                                     DETAINED.

Joel shoved the keys to the Honda into his denim pocket as he approached the girl who stood before the old sign, almost transfixed by the large blue letters spray painted across the front of it. A single word, spelled out in all capital letters.

“‘LIES’,” she read solemnly.

He put his hand on her small shoulder.

“They just left these people here? Even after they told them they were coming to get them? That’s just… fuck. That’s just _mean_.”

“Maybe they meant to come get ‘em, Ellie. Maybe they meant to and they just couldn’t. Who knows?” he lied, trying to give her some measure of comfort.

“I guess,” Ellie agreed, suddenly tired of these little towns, each an old tragedy twenty years forgotten. She felt like her soul was wearing away at the edges. “It just seems like very little town we’ve drove through… these places are all just so _sad_ … you know?”

“Yeah,” Joel said, squeezing her shoulder. “I know.”

He held up the empty plastic jug in his left hand, the siphoning hose looped through the handle on the container. He rattled it lightly.

“C’mon, girl. We gotta find some gas.”

Ellie said nothing. She nodded and slipped her shotgun from her shoulder to her hands.

 

* * *

 

This pizza joint’s cheered up her some, Joel thought to himself.

It was one of those ‘family destinations’ joints, the kind that he’d spent so many hours in, surrounded by Sarah and her squealing, giggling little friends, back before the world fell apart. He’d dreaded the birthday parties at the time. It seemed like one her friends was always having a damn birthday. The pizza was lousy, the sodas half-flat from sitting in the big plastic pitchers for too long, and the kids just seemed to run in circles, around and round, screeching and laughing, only coming back to the huddled cluster of adults to ask for more money to get more tokens to try and win more crap from games more rigged than any you’d find at the state fair.

He’d dreaded those days at the time.

Now he’d give anything to have the power on for just a few minutes, to let Ellie try her hand at the crane game or the ski ball ramp or one of those dumb dance contest video games that Sarah had loved so much.

For a moment, he could see Sarah on the big pad of the ‘Rave Rave’ game, jumping around like a delighted idiot, keeping up with the arrows that scrolled up the screen too fast for him to keep up. He hated that game. But he always played it when she asked him to.

Betcha Ellie coulda kept up with her, he thought, sighting wistfully. Sarah woulda liked this kid.

God… Sarah’d be thirty-two by now. Older than I was on the night everything -

The sound of shattering glass brought him back to the present.

His hand went from his broken watch to the pistol on his hip. He blinked the memories of his long gone daughter away and the .45 slid smoothly from the snug confines of the holster.  
“I couldn’t find a way to open the damn thing,” Ellie said with a sheepish shrug, looking back over her shoulder at him as he swiveled around in her direction.

The girl had smashed the glass case of the crane game to get at the loot inside.

“You’re not supposed to open it. You’re supposed to feed a bunch of money into it and try to grab a toy with that big claw up there,” he explained, easing the gun back into the holster.

“Oh yeah?” Ellie said, eyes with wonder, brows wrinkled in doubt, not entirely sure that Joel wasn’t fucking with her. “That big robot claw?”

“Yep,” Joel said, ambling over to her. “You had to drop a shitload of quarters into the machine and use that little joystick right there to steer that claw around…”

Ellie watched as he indicated with his hand how the claw would have moved around over the pile of toys.

“Then you hit that button right there,” he said, tapping the big red button next to the joystick. “And then the claw would drop down and grab a toy.”

“And it would pick up it up for you? Cool.”

“Actually, most of the time, the claw would pick it up, lift it up to about… here,” he said, hovering his hand about four inches over the top of the toy pile. “And then the toy would slip out of the claw and you’d have to put another quarter in and try again.”

“What?! Gyp!”

“Yeah.”

“Pfft. My way is better,” Ellie snickered, pulling out a pair of red sunglasses sheathed in a brightly decorated plastic wrapper.

She tore the end of the wrapper with her teeth and tipped it over, letting the pink plastic sunglasses fall out into her waiting hand. The frames were in the shape of a pair of cartoonishly rounded hearts holding dark lenses. She unfolded them and slipped them onto her face. The dim confines of the old pizza joint plunged into a stylish darkness.

“Be honest,” she grinned. “How cool do I look with these on? Super cool? Or _massively_ fucking cool?”

 

* * *

 

Joel put the gallon jug of gasoline down on the linoleum floor of the little room. The house they had just broken into had probably been very nice once upon a time. The walls and ceiling were sagging and bulging, too long neglected for too many damp winters. What little light there was in here had to make a long trek from the boarded up windows of the kitchen at the other end of the hallway, the one that connected this small room with the rest of the house. At some point in the past, the bottom of the hot water heater had rusted out, flooding the floor in here with sediment rich water. The tiles were loose now, and coming up from the floor. Little light blue squares covered in a fine, white grit where the water had evaporated ages ago, leaving behind a crust of calcium and other minerals. Ellie entered the room behind him, squeezing past him to explore this confined space. She was still proudly wearing her sunglasses.

“Gotta be honest, Joel. I’ve never felt this badass before.”

“That a fact?”

“I mean, I’ve _always_ been a badass, but now it’s like the whole world can finally see how much of a badass I am.”

Joel shined his flashlight around, looking for supplies. They had already made one trip back to the bike with a gallon of gas. The dusty, cobwebbed car in the adjacent garage had provided another gallon. It was time to head back again, but it couldn’t hurt to look around a bit before they tried to scavenge up another few gallons.

“If you don’t take those things off you’re gonna bump into a wall or somethin’, kiddo.”

She snorted dismissively. “No way. I’m using sonar to find my way around in here. Like a clicker. The cordyceps gave me special powers.”

She licked her lips and made several silly popping noises with her open mouth.

“Hmm… My sonar tells me that I’m standing in front of an old washing machine.”

“Dryer,” he said flatly. “Washing machine is over there.”

“My sonar needs fine tuning,” she giggled.

“Zip it and get out one of those plastic sandwich bags. I’m going to clean out this lint trap.”

“Why?” she asked, peering over the top of the pink frames, watching him as he opened the round door of the old dryer and pulled the lint collector out. A thick, old layer of purple lint was packed into the mesh screen.

“Campfires,” he said. “It’s gettin’ cold and damp. Rainin’ a lot. Good, dry kindlin’ is gonna get scarce soon.”

She held the little plastic baggie open as he stuffed the wad of lint into it. The room was small but she didn’t mind crowding in here with him.

“So we’re gonna burn lint instead?”

“You take dryer lint and wrap it up inside an old newspaper,” he said, pantomiming the action, wrapping the imaginary paper around the lint until he had made something shaped more or less like a burrito. “Then you place that in the middle of the kindlin’ pile and light it. It’ll burn long enough to catch the wood. Dryer lint burns great. We’ll need this stuff on those cold nights when all we’ve got is a bunch of damp kindlin’.”

“Sweet! Man, you know all kinds of stuff, Joel.” She pinched the baggie shut. “I used to do laundry all the time back at the school. I just threw the lint away. I had no idea I had a do-it-yourself arson kit. Man! If only I had a time machine!”

 

* * *

 

The parking lot of the ‘Granny’s Big Bloomers’ florist shop served as the corner of the enclosed area fenced in and protected by the perimeter of the improvised barrier. The wall was made from old appliances, rusted cars, and junk piled high and welded or chained together however the builders could manage, until it had provided some measure of protection from the world going to hell on the other side.

They had glimpsed only a few infected here and there as they made their way through the ghost town. Most of the damned things were dead or almost so. A few homes were filled up with grotesque columns and lumpy masses of fungus, red stalks reaching out from thick white plates like tendrils feeling their way through the heavy clouds of spores, waiting for someone to come stumbling into the darkened indoor forest and become a willing slave ready to carry the fungus on to some new place.

“Spooky,” she said. “How long do you think these people have been gone?”

“They’ve been gone a while from the looks of it.”

“Good,” she shivered. “For us, I mean.”

“Yep. But they left plenty of stuff we can use. The bike’s almost full. Let’s do one more round of lookin’ and then we’ll get back on the road.”

“‘Kay.”

The barricade was so old and rusted that Joel was easily able to pry enough of it aside to allow them to slip inside. They were careful not to snag their clothes or their skin on any of the numerous rusty points.

On the other side of the rusty, dilapidated barrier, a shrine of sorts had been built in the parking lot of the flower shop. As Joel scanned the enclosed area inside the ad hoc fence, Ellie eased closer to the memorial. Joel mistakenly assumed she was interested in the broken windows and verdant, cracked sidewalk of the overgrown flower shop, rich with the colorful abundance of late summer blooms.

“Don’t wander off, Ellie.”

“I won’t,” she said a little petulantly, keeping her voice low in the same manner as her older partner. She was curious. She didn’t need babysitting. “I just wanna look at this.”

The shrine had begun as one of the many ‘Mandatory Evacuation’ signs located around the town, but it had been painted with a thick coat of white enamel and repurposed. It was covered in tattered bit of paper, each held in place by a wild assortment of magnets. Whatever had once been written on the notes had been scrubbed into illegibility by the sun. There had been photos affixed here too, but they were little more than bleached, brittle ribbons now. As if on cue, a breeze blew through, making all the little tatters flutter and flap. Confronted with the lonely, unreadable remains of the long-forgotten shrine, Ellie sighed sadly and thought about opening one of her joke books to dispel the bitter mood she felt rising inside her.

“Do you think any of these –“ she began.

“Hush,” Joel hissed, his ears straining. He might have heard a distant clicking, but he wasn’t sure.

Ellie sighed. Joel wouldn’t know. He hadn’t been to this town before. She wasn’t even sure why she had wanted to ask him. She wanted these people to have survived somehow, to have escaped, maybe to have made it to a better place than this. But there were no better places. This was it. This was all there was for these people. And there were none of them left now. This place was a ghost town.

She remembered the dead woman with the bullet hole in her skull back in Johnstown, Ohio. The woman with the bunker still packed with every conceivable item you’d need to survive an apocalypse. Everything but food, of course. The bunker was a tomb now, a memorial for a woman with no name. This town was the same. A shrine built to hold the memory of these people. The memories had faded away. The people were gone. She and Joel were here to take whatever remained of use, like grave robbers.

Ellie missed people. She loved being out here all alone with Joel. But she missed the sound of the school, the noises of Boston, the clatter and din of a world going on outside the fenced-in campus.

“We need to head back soon,” he said, a half-full jug of gasoline in his hand. “Top this off and then we’ll go. Okay?”

“Sure thing,” she sighed, and turned her back on the sad, lonely shrine.

 

* * *

 

Better than any bank. That’s what Tommy used to say. He was pretty reckless with money and tended to run out of cash a few days before his next paycheck came in. Baby brother had got many a loan from places like this. Joel had done it himself a few times too, especially in the early days, before he had found work in construction, back when he was just sixteen and bagging groceries at the H-E-B store, scared shitless because he’d knocked his girlfriend up and stocking shelves wasn’t going to be enough to pay the bills that were rushing towards him like a bad storm.

He led Ellie down an alley between the red brick office of the local real estate broker and the gray and tan Family Dollar Store. He could see the pawnshop across the street, through the narrow gap. Those places often had stuff worth taking, he told her. People tended to hit all the obvious places and clean them out first, just like the Family Dollar with all the bare shelves they had just passed. But pawnshops were often a good source of supplies, even today, so many years after the worst of the riots and the panic, when the CBI pandemic was still so new that nobody understood it. Pawnshops were still a good bet for people looking to limp along for a little while longer. Better than any bank, just like Tommy said.

“Why’s that?” she asked, the big Winchester rifle in her hands swinging back and forth across her belly as she walked across the empty parking lot of the ‘Cash-4-Pawn’.

“You’re smart. You tell me, Red,” he said stopping a few feet in front of the building, motioning towards the armored door and the heavy steel bars across the opaque, bulletproof windows.

“Damn. It’s like a fortress. So this is like a bank or something?” she asked.

“Not really. Banks were a lot easier to rob.”

“Yeah? Cool. How do we get inside? Can you shiv that door?”

“That lock? No way. Even a slug couldn’t punch through that. We’ll go around back and see how it looks back there.”

“Okay. Lead the way.”

**. . .**   


“You ever go to place like this? And what is this place, exactly?” The alley was a tight fit, packed with old junk and scattered garbage. A short fence at the end of the alley blocked them out. They had climbed over it easily enough by stacking a milk crate on top of a trashcan.

She dropped down easily next to him.

“A few times, when I was young and money was tight.” He looked around.

There was a small parking lot back here, probably for employees only. An old Chevrolet Monte Carlo, its purple paint faded, its white vinyl top cracked and peeling, sat in the middle of the lot, parked neatly between the lines. A high fence blocked it off on one side, connecting to the fence they had just climbed over. Across from that fence, in the center of a second fence, was an open space where a missing gate had once been, allowing access to the street. The back wall of another business boxed in the lot, apparently sharing these few parking spaces with the pawnshop. A large, roll up garage door was set in that wall. It was closed. An old city dumpster sat diagonally in the corner of the lot nearest them, overflowing with piles of old garbage. The smell was overpowering.

“You got money from here? Like a bank?” she asked, not following this conversation very well, distracted by the foul odor of the dumpster and the strange, long-gone world Joel was describing.

“Sorta,” he said, looking at the lock set into the pawnshop door closely.

It was built strong with thick steel bars and a strong metal mesh. Impossible to break with a shiv. Maybe with a slug, but even then, the interior door visible behind this one was solid metal and had a trio of deadbolts visible. It might take more slugs than he had to get this door open. Still, it looked as though this place had been sealed up for years. There might be a real treasure trove inside.

“This is a pawn shop,” he explained. “You brought in stuff you had that was worth money and they’d keep your stuff and loan you cash. If you could pay them back quick enough, in a month or so, you got your stuff back. If you couldn’t, they kept your stuff.”

“Hunh… That’s the first thing you’ve told me about the old world that actually makes perfect sense to me. I think –“ she cut herself off, dropping low. She hissed to him, pulling him down with one small hand, her eyes round and white with fear. “Infected!”

His blood ran cold. He knelt quickly by the back door of the pawnshop, looked where she was pointing. Across the parking lot, by the open gate, on the far side of the curb, a yellow van with the letters DHL painted on the side rusted away quietly. A clicker had emerged from behind the van and was about to wander his way into the enclosed parking lot. It clicked haltingly, deeply. Its distorted barrel of a throat produced a deep resonance that sent a shiver down Joel’s spine. Ellie shuddered visibly.

**CLICK… CLICK-CLICK… CLICK…**

It was very old, covered over in thick fungal plates. The growths across the neck and shoulders were so numerous they overlapped, layered together, giving the monster a slightly hunchbacked appearance. The neck was so protected that there was no way the thing could turn its head. Tall, spindly stalks of fungus rose up from the head like a crest. The face was split open, layers upon layers of fungus sprouted out, hiding everything but the hideous teeth, cracked and yellowed. The powder blue dress shirt that it had once worn was nothing more than a series of raggedy, crisscrossed strips, strapped tightly across the bulging, fuzzy torso. A silk tie was still hanging from the neck, half-absorbed under the bulging, distended skin and sickly white tendrils. The belly of the thing had become hard and swollen by the fungus growing inside it, splitting the old khaki slacks apart at the waist. The tatters of the pants were a confining band around the thing’s ankles, like poly/cotton twill shackles. The shuffling steps it had to take because of the way its pants limited its stride would have been humorous under other circumstances.

“Jeez,” Ellie breathed quietly, her face a mask of horror and revulsion. “You can see his wiener.”

Joel looked. She was right. Fungus was growing on it in a soft, fuzzy white tuft.

“Bloater?” she asked in her lowest voice, her face inclined towards Joel, but the green eyes behind the pink sunglasses riveted to the monster slowly tottering its way into their small, enclosed space behind the pawnshop.

“No,” whispered Joel. “Just a clicker. But a real old one. Probably turn into a bloater in a year or two. Gotta be careful with this one. That thing’s gonna soak up a lot of bullets before it goes down.”

“We’re gonna fight it?!” Even strained as it was into a harsh whisper, her incredulity was unmistakable.

“Not if we don’t have to. We need to distract it, draw it away, back towards that street. Then we can get to the alley and get the fuck out of here. Look for a bottle or somethin’, okay?”

But there was nothing. The parking lot was shockingly clean, weirdly tidy, all things considered, and they didn’t dare move from their place by the pawnshop door until they could find a way to get that monster to look somewhere else. It slowly staggered closer. Soon it would be close enough to locate them.

**CLICK CLICK… CLICK-ICK… CLICK…**

“Fuck,” Joel muttered, an icy ball of fear forming in the pit of his stomach. “We gotta get out of here. I’ll try to draw it away and you make for the alley, okay?”

Ellie sighed, her face a mix of worry and shame. She looked at Joel. Looked away. Looked at her shoes. She pressed her lips together and summoned up her courage.

“No need. I got it taken care of,” she mumbled.

She handed him the rifle; he took it in his off hand. Quietly as she could, she slipped off her backpack and opened it. She winced at the sound the zipper made.

“You got a bottle in there? Good girl.” His voice was low and proud.

“Not exactly,” she whispered, the corners of her mouth turned down. “It’s something I picked up in that store where I got the Steve Miller shirt.”

“That head shop?” he asked quietly.

“Yeah.”

Ellie pulled out a bundle of red terrycloth shop towels from the garage they had visited earlier. She quickly unwrapped the carefully swaddled item.

“Don’t judge me,” she hissed, her voice tinged with defensive anger, her cheeks already turning red.

In her hand was a blue-tinted glass bong in the shape of a naked man with a very fancy top hat, a very classy monocle, and a very large erection.

“It’s a juice bottle, I think,” she whispered. “You pour the juice in here, in the hat, and you put your straw in down here, in his…um…”

Joel and Ellie stared at each other for a very awkward, very brief moment. They made an unspoken pact that they would never, ever, ever talk about this. Ever.

“Throw it, please,” Joel murmured. “Throw it, Ellie. Go on now.”

“I’m only doing this because we’re friends and I don’t want us to get eaten by the naked wiener bloater man,” she muttered, jabbing at him with her finger. “And I would’ve _never_ shown this to you if we weren’t such good friends, Joel.”

“Hush up. Draw him away from here. Or give it to me and I’ll throw the goddamned thing,” he hissed.

She hissed in reply, “No way! Baron Fancyhat McPickle is mine. I’ll take care of it. Stay here.”

She crouched low, slipped as quietly as she could across the pavement, creeping a few feet away from Joel, working her way to the front of the old Monte Carlo, getting a clear line of sight to the monster, trying to line up a throw over the top of the beast, to hit the yellow van behind it. Joel slung the hunting rifle and readied the shotgun, just in case.

A torrent of gasoline poured down from the roof of the pawnshop, drenching Joel from head to toe. He choked and sputtered, banged his shoulder against the door as flailed about blindly, tumbling forward on the blacktop, sprawling on his face. Ellie shrieked. The clicker roared, the cordyceps pumping his grotesque body full of adrenaline and rage, triggered by the sudden eruption of sound.

“JESUS!” Joel coughed, gagging, and retching, his nose choked with the gasoline fumes, his sinuses raw and filling with mucus.

”SURPRISE, YOU THIEVING MOTHERFUCKERS!” someone shouted from the roof above.

Ellie looked up in terror. She saw a man up there, a gasmask hiding his features, long, unkempt white hair sticking out from beneath a wide-brimmed hat, a denim duster coat partially concealing a bandolier of red shotgun shells and crisscrossed gunbelts. An empty five-gallon plastic bucket swung from the looped metal handle gripped in his gloved hand.

He threw the bucket at Ellie. It struck the door of the car loudly, bounced off and tumbled across the blacktop with a hollow clatter. The bloater swiveled on her. Her throat clamped shut in fear. It was only fifteen feet away, at most.

“Oh fuck,” she squeaked.

“Ellie!” she heard Joel cry out. “Agh! What the fuck’s goin’ on?!”

She swiveled her head to look at Joel. His eyes were screwed shut, puffy and swollen, his face wet with fuel, gasoline running from his saturated body in streams. He stood in a large, spreading pool of the stuff. Already the edges of the rapidly growing circle of fuel were almost halfway to the fence gate.

_Oh fuck!_

”BURN!!!” the man shouted.

Her eyes darted up to the roof. The man had a bottle with a rag wrapped around it. She knew right away what it was. His other hand held a cheap disposable lighter.

_OH FUCK!_

His thumbed flicked the wheel, sparks danced and the rag caught fire.

“NOOO!!” she screamed, her arm was already cocked, the glass bong ready in her hand. The energy coiled up inside her small arm burst forth in a whip crack of motion. The little naked glass man rocketed from her hand, streaking though the air, the late afternoon light catching the hand-shaped glory of each sculpted muscle, sparkling and twinkling on his fashionable top hat, his ridiculously large erection, his incredibly stylish monocle. She wasn’t someone who had played high school football like Joel had, but she’d been breaking windows with rocks almost every day of her misspent teenage life. Her aim was true. She was the brick master.

The man stumbled backwards, cursing, completely caught off guard by the little naked glass man that had just exploded against the lenses of his gasmask. Even for a paranoid loner like himself, there are some things you simply can’t prepare for. The Molotov cocktail spun out of his hand, dropping over the side of the pawnshop and dousing the alley with flames.

_Oh fuck! Can’t go back that way! Think, Ellie! Think!_

“Ellie!” Joel shouted, his eyes swollen shut, his hand reaching out for her, still determined to help her however he could.

She grabbed him by his left hand, the one not holding the shotgun.

“Come on, Joel!”

“Th’ fuck’s happenin’?!” His voice was hoarse; the gasoline fumes were choking him.

“We’re getting out of here! Come on!”

She tugged hard, forcing him to follow her. She awkwardly drew her pistol with her left hand, took a couple of snapshots at the man on the roof, forcing him into cover before he could bring his shotgun to bear on them. She expended the rest of the magazine into the head of the slowly advancing old clicker, to no effect whatsoever.

“Motherfucker!” she shouted, pulling Joel across the small employee’s parking lot, trying to get him into the cover of overflowing dumpster in the corner of the fence. She let go of him just long enough to reload her pistol and then reached for his big hand again.

The man on the roof was shouting again.

“Get ‘em, Conway! Fuck ‘em up, you shuffling old bastard!”

The clicker roared, almost as though he was responding to the exhortations.

Another Molotov cocktail sailed through the air, falling short and striking the side of the dumpster facing the pawnshop. It burst into flames. They could hear the air being sucked up by the fire, feel the heat coming from the burning trash above them. If any of it tumbled loose and fell on Joel…

“Oh Christ!” Joel said, his voice choked and afraid. She’d never heard him on the edge of panic like this. It chilled her to the very marrow of her bones.

She tugged him to the far edge of the dumpster, as far from the burning trash as she could. But the flames were spreading fast, the whole thing would be ablaze soon.

“Come here! Stay down, Joel! It’s not safe!”

“No shit!” he groused, rubbing at his eyes, his voice sounded strange. His nose was stuffy. His shotgun lay on the ground, forgotten. The hunting rifle hung half off his arm, banging against the side of the rusty trash container. He let it slide to the ground, shucked his backpack, tried to open it with fumbling fingers. He needed rag, a towel, something, anything!

She risked a peek around the far corner of the dumpster. The clicker was shuffling his way along, teeth clacking, throat clicking, making his way towards the last place he had detected them: the other end of the dumpster. He shambled his way into the big puddle of shimmering, oily gasoline that had been dumped on Joel.

She popped a few shots at the man on the roof again, forcing him into cover just as he was about to light another firebomb. She prayed he didn’t have too many of those fucking things left. Even a small splash of burning fuel would turn Joel into a walking torch.

“Joel,” she urged, her hands tugging on the straps of his backpack, “take your shirt off! Hurry! I need it! _Hurry!_ ”

“What? Can’t see!” he shouted, untucking his old shirt, pulling it up around himself, trusting her, hoping she had a plan.

“I know, I know. Gimme a second!” She helped him pulled the fuel-soaked old brown t-shirt over his head, shoved her bottle of water into his hands. “Rinse your eyes! Hurry!”

While he upended the bottle into his eyes, she stuffed his soaked shirt into a small glass mayonnaise jar she pulled from the dumpster. She ripped off the last shots in her magazine at the man peeping over the top of the roof. She shoved the empty pistol into her pocket and fished her Hello Kitty lighter out. The clicker was almost across the puddle of fuel. She lit the wadded shirt, the glass jar holding it filled with flame, the glass blackening. It would crack at any second.

She threw it at the clicker. It broke, the flaming shirt landing in the fuel and setting the puddle alight. The clicker bellowed, engulfed in flames, but still coming. The man on the roof screamed in anger.

“Conway! No!! You fucking little bitch!”

The man stood on the roof stood up again, one foot on the little wall that ran around the edge of the roof. He pumped his shotgun dramatically, his eyes leaving the burning form of his favorite clicker, his gaze searching for Ellie instead. He found her. If the lenses of his mask weren’t so darkly tinted, the whites of his wide eyes would have shown through clearly.

“Fuck!” He shouted, surprised. He was in her sights.

Ellie was crouched low near the corner of the dumpster, Joel’s shotgun in her hands, the butt of the weapon braced against the blacktop, held in place by her foot. She aimed it like a mortar. It belched smoke as she pulled the trigger. The man on the roof dove for cover, screaming, his left arm heavily peppered with buckshot. He cursed loudly. So did she.

“Eat me, you crazy motherfucker!”

The stock had slid against the ground slightly so she shoved her foot against it, bracing it in place. She pumped the slide, pulled the trigger, pumped the slide, pulled the trigger. Again. Again. Again. Hundreds of pellets shrieked through the air, striking the edge of the rooftop like a hailstorm.

The big Remington clicked empty at last. She scooted back into cover and looked to Joel. He was kicking his last boot off, trying to step out of his gasoline-saturated jeans. His eyes were puffy and red, barely more than narrow slits. Snot ran from his nose. Despite it all, she saved a mental snapshot of him at this moment. The boxers or briefs question had been answered.

_Boxer briefs. Of course. Best of both worlds. Good choice, Joel. I like the color too. Dark red. Riley used to have a tank top that same color._

A small bit of flaming trash fell from the dumpster, dangerously close to Joel’s soaked pack. He recoiled from it instinctively. Ellie kicked the pack away from the little fire, sending it skidding along the surface of the parking lot, towards the Monte Carlo.

Joel scooped up his revolver in one hand, his semiautomatic in the other. She grabbed the spare magazines for the Colt that had fallen out of his jeans pockets as he had undressed.

“We gotta get outta here, Ellie!” he shouted through stuffed up sinuses, trying to get the Winchester and the Remington slung across his shoulders.

“No shit, Joel! What the fuck do we do? I’m out of ideas!” She shoved his pistol magazines into her denim pockets. He didn’t have any place to put them. She scooped up the keys to the Honda too.

He looked around, trying to get himself up to speed on the situation. The alley through which they had arrived was still on fire and his skin was slick with gasoline. The other way across the parking lot, towards the street and the yellow van, was blocked by the spreading pool of blazing fuel and the burning clicker dragging its way towards them, almost to the dumpster now. A high fence blocked the area behind the dumpster, trapping them back here. Climbing it with a gunman on the roof and a clicker just ten feet away was suicide. The only way left was across the little parking lot, towards what looked to be the back entrance of a custom wheels and tinting shop.

He wanted to reload the shotgun, but the kid had kicked his pack halfway across the parking lot. He had a pistol in each hand and no pockets. He knew he had to make every shot count until he could find a safe place to reload.

The clicker rounded the corner of the dumpster, reaching for them, flames blackening the fungus and the flesh of its arm. It roared, fire in its mouth, the very embodiment of her worst nightmares. Ellie shrieked and started to raise her short double-barreled shotgun. Joel backed up, interposing himself between the girl and the monster. It tried to reach into the confined space behind the dumpster, pushing the burning container with its powerful bulk. Bits of burning garbage rolled free, falling to the ground all around them. Joel was still damp with gasoline. Ellie was drenched with cold sweat.

“Go, Ellie! Move!”

“Damn it, Joel! Get out of the way! He’s gonna set you on fire! Move! I got this!”

“Goddamnit! I said go, Ellie!” he shouted, shoving her back, away from the small gap between the edge of the dumpster and the chain link fence, back towards the parking lot. “Go! Go!”

“Go _where!?_ ” She was still trying to edge around him to get at the clicker, shotgun in hand, pressing her small body close against his naked skin, trying to get a clear shot, as he pushed them both away from the grasping monster.

“Across the way! Towards that garage door! Go!”

She dashed out into the parking lot with him close behind. They broke into a run, covering the distance as fast as they could. Another firebomb sailed over the top of the dumpster and doused the place where they had just been standing, turning the little safe haven into a roaring fire pit. Joel’s discarded jeans burst into flames, the tongues of fire lapping up to join the larger conflagration of the dumpster. The clicker thundered its rage, burning and smoking, but not dying. The shotgun shells in Joel’s jean pocket began to cook off. A half-dozen explosions detonated in the little corner of the fence, buckshot caroming around wildly, bouncing off of steel and brick, shrieking through the air like a cloud of angry hornets. Much of it struck the clicker, but it took no notice. The handful of revolver rounds in the other pants pocket went off next.

Ellie was hauling ass, moving as fast as she could. She easily outdistanced Joel, who was weighed down with two wildly swinging guns that refused to stay in place on his naked shoulders. His socked feet slipped easily on the blacktop and he couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with her. A firebomb was going to come sailing down on him any moment now, he was certain of it. He gritted his teeth and decided to buy her some time to get away. He twisted around, slowing down to a trot, bringing his Taurus revolver up to cover the roof.

Show me your face, asshole, he thought. C’mon.

The man did, for just a second. He saw Joel and ducked back down just as the bullet Joel had sent his way whistled over his head, creasing the greasy, faded fabric of the olive drab boonie hat on his head.

The blazing clicker moved out from behind the dumpster, drawn to the sound of the gunfire. Joel’s mouth drew itself into a thin line. This was bad and getting worse.

Ellie’s voice was high and shrill behind him. “Here! Lift! Hurry!”

He put a bullet into the clicker to minimal effect. The old khaki slacks that had bound up its legs for so long had finally burned away. It seemed to be struggling with the larger steps it was taking, as though it had forgotten how to make a longer stride work.

“Here,” Joel said, handing the revolver to Ellie. “Cover us!”

She took it eagerly, began to cap off rounds at the clicker and the man hiding on the roof, holding it with both hands, pulling the heavy trigger with two small fingers.

Out of habit, Joel tucked his .45 into the small of his back, in the waistband of his underwear. It was much too heavy and pulled his underwear low around his hips. It was too late to do anything about it; his hands were already on the lip of the garage door, pulling up hard.

The revolver in Ellie’s hands clicked on an empty chamber. The clicker was only a dozen feet away, stumbling and swaying towards them fast. Joel felt her small hand reaching into the underwear slung low around his hips, her wrist working against the bottom of the crack of his ass, her fingers too near his balls, trying to get a grip on the big .45 lying in the crotch of his much-too-low Fruit of the Loom’s.

“Sorry!” she was shouting, her hands trying to turn the gun over, to tug it clear of his underwear. Its hammer was hooked under the elastic waistband, her knuckles batting roughly at his balls as she struggled to free it. He winced with each unintended blow she delivered.

“Ellie! Forget the gun! Get inside!” he shouted.

She saw the opening he’d made, jerked her hand free of his underwear, darted inside, rolled over on her back, shoved her feet up at the bottom of the door and pushed as hard as her legs were capable of. There wasn’t time to look for something to prop it open with. She was glad there weren’t any more glass items in her backpack. Anything in there was about to get smushed as she prepared to take the weight of the heavy door with her legs.

“Ellie! That ain’t gonna work! Find something - ” He was cut off by the roar of the clicker.

She saw the monster rushing at Joel, his underwear halfway to his knees, the hunting rifle swinging from his elbow by its sling, the shotgun strap almost ready to slip free from his wrist. He wouldn’t get either gun ready in time. If she weren’t so sick with fear, it might have been comical. His eyes met hers. She could see that they were both afraid.

She pushed up with her legs with all her might, and screamed loudly from the effort. The door weighed a ton, but she lifted it enough for him to have the room he would need. The monster needed only another step or two before it could grab her friend. Her voice was a strained scream.

“JOEL! GET IN!”

He dropped to the ground, guns clattering on the concrete, rolled inside, grabbed her under the arms, and pulled her to him as the clicker stooped to reach for her. He grunted. She squealed. The door dropped down like a guillotine, the sound of the impact thundering inside the empty garage, echoing all around them, as they lay huddled in the darkness. They breathed together for a terrified moment. She lay facing up, draped across his body, his hands still under her arms, fingers splayed across the edges of her chest, looking up at the dim ceiling together. She was trembling too much to notice that he was shaking a little bit too as she rested the back of her head against his shoulder, the knot of her pony tail pressed into the hollow of his throat. The smell of gasoline assailed her nostrils. He was saturated with it, slick and sweaty against her as she rested on top of him, his skin warm and damp against her backside. His big fingers were practically on her breasts. He hadn’t noticed yet, and she wished they were just a little bit closer. Just a little bit. Her nipples were hard and wanted his fingers to brush against them. They could both pretend it was an accident. The fear and adrenaline washed over her, as she lay in his arms, feeling his sinewy chest rising and falling beneath her. She was shocked to find that she was still alive and suddenly incredibly horny too. She wanted to laugh, to kiss him, to feel those big balls of his, warm against the back of her hand again. She was reckless with lust, both for life and for him.

_Touch me, Joel. Touch my tits. Fuck! I have to say the words. Grab my tits, Joel! Do it! I want you to! I need you to! Fuck it! I’m going to say it._

Ellie’s voice was tiny and unsteady, scared and filled with desire. “H-holy shit, Joel. Grab -“

She was interrupted by the clicker slamming its bulk against the door, warping it with the force of the collision.

“Jesus! Shit!” He said, dragging them both to their feet. His .45 fell out of his underwear, which was now bunched around his knees. He grimaced and pulled them up one-handed, trying vainly to cover himself with the other hand. All the while, she looked away and pretended that she hadn’t seen anything noteworthy dangling and flopping around down there on her way up from the floor. She pretended that she wasn’t wet from her intense need for him. She had wanted to touch it so badly when she saw it hanging there, as she came to her feet. Her hand had brushed against it, just a little, as he lifted her to her feet. She wondered if he’d felt it. Her cheeks were red. He didn’t notice the struggle going on inside her. He wasn’t even looking at her as he fumbled with his underwear, trying to hide himself from her, certain that she didn’t need to see him like this. He was so very wrong.

“Fuck,” he hissed, embarrassed. She didn’t think he had any reason to be. She wanted to tell him that, but she suspected it would only make him feel more awkward.

Ellie gasped, the out-of-the-blue horniness gone in an instant, struck by a sudden, life-saving insight. She raced to the chain-pull mechanism of the door and dropped to one knee. The door shuddered again as the clicker began to pound it with his fist, clutching at the buckling segments of the door, trying to find a handhold, or create one if it could.

“Oh fuck,” she muttered, her trembling, stupid hands working as fast as she could force them. She was shaking so much that she felt her teeth would rattle loose at any minute.

“What are you doing, kid?” he barked, his nakedness covered, taking a half step back, ready to be anywhere but here but not wanting to leave her behind. “Let’s _go!_ ”

She fished out a pair of needle nose pliers from her pack. The precision-forged steel were stamped with the words ‘Snap-on Tools’ and she had kept them because they might be useful to pull a bullet out of somebody one day. She shoved one red vinyl-covered handle into the gap of the chain and through the metal hasp where a padlock would go. She opened the handles as wide as they would go and flipped them over, making the best lock of them that she could.

“Think that’ll hold?” she asked, scrambling to her feet and dashing to his side near the back wall of the shop.

“God, I sure hope so,” he said, slipping a comforting arm around her as they watched the door ripple from another barrage of attacks. The clicker was tearing at it, trying to move it, but the improvised lock held fast. Joel’s .45 was steady in his other hand, never wavering from where he aimed it at center of the shuddering, rattling door.

They waited. The lock held. She leaned in close to him, drawing comfort from the feel of his big arm on her shoulder. His empty revolver was still shoved tightly into the waistband of her jeans. She thought of the hard gun pressed against her flesh and images of his cock, erect and jutting up against the blanket as he lay sleeping back at the Motel 6 flashed through her mind. Feelings of lust began to heat her body again.

He exhaled, his eyes on the door. His voice was hoarse and nasal from the gasoline fumes, but his words were a marvelously soothing comfort to her.

“You remembered that trick from that lady’s garage, huh? Smart girl.”

“Fuck yes, I am. I’m awesome, buddy. And don’t you forget it,” She nuzzled into him, her cheek pressed against his hairy chest, hoping that he wouldn’t mind. She had just saved his life after all. She wrapped her arm around his naked waist and hugged him as tight as she dared, which was pretty damn tight, all things considered.

_Let’s do it, Joel. Come on. I’m ready. Let’s have sex._

She wanted to reach down and touch the large bulge at the front of his underwear. She wanted to feel it pressed against the palm of her hand, warm and soft. She wanted to feel it grow hard in her hand.

_Seriously, Joel. We’ll find a way out of here. We’ll get back to the bike. We’ll go some place quiet and safe… and we’ll do it. And it will be so fucking great._

_Hee hee. ‘Fucking great…great fucking’. I made a pun!_

He didn’t say a word. He just stood there with his arm around her shoulder, holding her close and letting her hug the bejeezus out of him. That business in the parking lot had been damn close for both of them. If she wanted a hug, he figured she had earned one.

Thank Christ for this kid, he realized. I’d be a dead man without her. Or worse.

_Fuck, you owe me one, dude. Take me somewhere and bang me and we’ll call it even._

“Mmmmm…. Ohhhhh-kay,” she sighed slowly, contentedly, letting go of him at last, her eyes spending only a very discreet, very brief second looking at the immense expanse of his hairy chest, the powerful muscles of his flat stomach, the intriguing, masculine shape cleanly outlined against the fabric of his snug underwear. “Ahhh. So… where to next, Joel?”

“Out the front,” he said, noticing that she was looking down, checking him out in a way that she must have thought was discreet but wasn’t anything near subtle. He forced himself not to think about it, tried to tell himself that it was just natural curiosity on her part.

Just get her out of here, he reminded himself. Get her out of here and you two can sort this mess out later. Cause you just know she’s gonna want to talk about it. She talks about everything interesting she sees, and this day has probably been a real doozy so far.

“This way, Ellie.” He headed through the small interior door set in the back wall and made for the front of the shop.

_God, that man has a nice butt. I wish I wasn’t about to piss myself in terror, or I might be able to enjoy this even more._

“Whatever you say, Joel.” She followed him, but not too closely. Just far enough that she could watch the hard muscles in his ass work as he walked.

_Fuck, I wish I had Riley’s old camera._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The idea of a “heavy clicker” (or “super clicker”?) seems like a natural progression of Cordyceps. There’s a clear transition between runner and clicker (the stalker) but no transitional stage between clicker and bloater. Personally, I think an old, crusty clicker would make a great mini-boss for the game. It could have clicker strength with more armor / hit points, no bloater-style instant grab death attack, and you can’t shiv them as the fungal plates are too thick around the neck and head. They would be bullet sponges, essentially, in a game where ammo is scarce. Feel free to include them in the next game, Naughty Dog. Free of charge. I’m doing this out of love, you know.
> 
> I used to have a friend that owned a pawnshop. The damn thing was like a fortress. I used to joke that if I needed to survive a zombie apocalypse, I was going to hole up in his back office (there’s a dirty joke in there somewhere, I just know it). His shop had guns, knives, camping equipment, everything you needed for the end of the world. The fact that he and his wife were a smoking hot couple and were both “very fond” of me was just icing on the cake. Man, I got some great deals on camping equipment there! ;-)
> 
> I knew a gay man who owns the bong that Ellie pulled out of her backpack. It looks EXACTLY as I described it. He called it “The Blue Baron.”
> 
> I also apologize for the gratuitous use of (Fe)male Gaze at the end of the story. You women are always undressing us men with your eyes. It’s the most hoary and worn out of tropes. We menfolk aren’t just pieces of meat for you to ogle, ladies. We have faces and they’re up here, thank you. Maybe you should stop staring at our rippling muscles, our manly bulges, and our well-sculpted backsides and try talking to us for a change. And please try to make eye contact once in a while, okay? Our faces are up here, ladies. ;-)
> 
> See you fine people in a few days as Joel has more adventures in his underwear and Ellie tries not to stare too much. Read all about it in Chapter Twelve: Castling.


	12. Castling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel continues to run around naked. Ellie continues to enjoy it.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 12 – Castling**

 

There were more clickers on the street out front. She thought she glimpsed a few stalkers in the windows and darkened doorways of the buildings across the way from the shop. This part of town was crawling with the infected. The old, corroded barricades must have fallen apart somewhere. Whatever safety Abingdon had once offered was long gone now, just a memory, like all the people who had tried to hide from the world inside the cobbled together fences that had built in haste and could not be built to last.

She and Joel crouched low near the front window of the ‘Wheeler’s Custom Car’ shop. They were safe in here. The front door was locked and the Plexiglas windows were intact. But they had nowhere to go. The old, charred clicker was no longer banging on the back door, drawing attention to the place, but he could still be heard stomping around out there in the rear parking lot, trapped by a chain link sense his echolocation couldn’t quite perceive.

“Damn it,” hissed Joel, his nose still somewhat stuffy from the gasoline fumes he had sucked down earlier, “That big bastard’s still spookin’ around out back and the streets out here are crawlin’. We’re in some deep shit, Red.”

He had wiped as much of the fuel off as he could using the big wad of red shop towels she’d had in her backpack, the ones she’d had the blue bong wrapped up in before she’d shattered it across the face of the crazy survivor on the roof on the pawn shop. Both of their water bottles were empty now, having been used to flush his eyes and face. Their canteens were almost empty too. He’d searched this shop from top to bottom but hadn’t found anything useful and nothing at all to wear. He was not happy about that. Ellie was surprisingly okay with it, but kept that to herself.

_I’m being stupid. He’s more vulnerable like this, I know… but so long as we’re safe in here…it’s okay to look. Right?_

He glanced over, caught her looking at him again. He cleared his throat. Her eyes darted up, saw that she was busted. She blushed and looked across the room, trying to make him believe that the twenty years out of date calendar on the wall was the most interesting thing in the history of ever. She was riveted by it. Incredibly fascinating stuff, that tool calendar. Ridgid Tools were used by women in red bikinis, apparently. And obviously there was no better place to use a weird looking doodad like a chain wrench than on the beach. Nothing else about the old word made much sense, so why should this calendar be any different?

Could have been worse, he thought to himself, at least she was looking at my chest this time. Not like before. Much as it’s going to embarrass both of us, I need to say something. She’s going to get ideas if we don’t sort this out right now. She’s just curious, I know. It’s natural. She don’t mean nothing by it. Just like she didn’t mean to show so much of herself to me the other night when she was changing clothes and getting ready for bed. She’s just curious. Hell, young as she is, she probably don’t even know what sex is. She’s just curious, that’s all. I don’t want to hurt her feelings or nothing.

“This ain’t a peep show, girl.” His voice was stern, his eyes hard.

“Sorry,” she said, doing her best not to grin, knowing that he was getting upset with her, but still too distracted by all the Joel on display today to check herself. “I know… I just… Sorry.”

He sat back against the wall with a resigned sigh. This day had started out so good too. Where had it all gone wrong? And why was she still grinning? She was staring at her shoes, and there wasn’t anything amusing there that he could see.

“Not sure I find this as funny as you do, Ellie,” he grumped.

“It’s not funny,” she said, her green eyes darting to his darker eyes, trepidation on her lovely face. “It’s not. It’s… umm…”

_Damn, he’s got some big chest muscles. Pecs. That’s what Riley always called them. She loved a boy with nice pecs. I never got the appeal. Not until now._

“It’s what?” he asked wearily, one eyebrow raised, daring her to say the wrong thing.

“It’s… um… it’s…”

_It’s hot. Super fucking hot._

“Funny,” she finally conceded with a nicely feigned defeat. She cobbled together the lie as quickly as she could. “Your clothes got burned up and now you’re running around in your underwear. And it’s funny.”

He grumbled.

She giggled.

_Holy fuck, you’re hot, Joel. And I saw it! Fuck, I touched it! Just a little bit, when I was trying to get that gun out of your underwear. I felt it against the back of my hand. I totally felt up your dick. And I saw your butt._

_And it was awesome!_

“Sucks to be you, dude,” she snickered, knowing that she would have to live with this lie now. It was either tell him a funny lie or tell him the awful truth and let him know how much he was turning her on lately.

_Fuck, I don’t have any choice but to lie to him. It’s all I can do if I don’t want him dumping me on the side of the road. He’d freak the fuck out if he knew the thoughts I’ve been thinking about him!_

He shook his head. He didn’t like her seeing him like this. Hell, he wouldn’t have liked Tess seeing him like this, but it was worse with Ellie for some reason. He already had unsettling ideas about this teenager that he was shamefully struggling with on an almost daily basis now. He was uneasy with the notion that she was thinking similar things about him, or that this experience might nudge her even further in that direction. How many times had he caught her looking at him in the half hour that they’d been hiding inside this place? Five times? Six?

She was secretly looking at him for the twelfth time, but she wasn’t keeping count either. She was too busy looking at his big thighs, marveling at the corded muscles, the sweaty skin, the dark hair. Her eyes began to drift upwards, moving towards his underwear again. She bit he bottom lip, squeezed her own thighs together in just the right way. Luckily, she managed to focus her attention somewhere else just before he could catch her again.

“Ummm…” she began, noticing the big ductwork overheard. “Why are those air ducts so big? How much air conditioning did they need in here?”

He looked up. “Those are exhaust vents, for sucking the paint fumes out of here when they were working on cars. That shit’ll choke the life out of you if it gets too thick.”

“Like gasoline fumes?” she asked.

“Yeah. Just like that.”

The day was wearing on. The air inside stuffy workshop continued to get warmer. He was sweating. She thought it looked great on him. The sweat beaded on his skin, collected in the hair on his arms, his chest. She had a hard time keeping her eyes off of his body, mesmerized by how the light from the window played across his skin. His eyes were on the air ducts overhead, his mind working something out. She knew she should ask him if he had a plan, but she was too distracted by the way his skin seemed to glow in the late afternoon light.

_Glistening. That’s the word I’m looking for. He’s glistening. That’s so hot._

She forced herself to look at her shoes again. Told her body to stop being so damn horny. It didn’t work. She decided to distract herself instead. She opened her backpack, took out a box of ammunition, one of three that she’d found back in Johnstown ten days ago. She tugged the collar of her shirt down a bit and began to fumble around inside her shirt, digging for the pistol magazine that she’d dumped in during the shootout in the parking lot. The creamy, soft, lightly freckled skin at the base of her neck was glistening too. Her arm was halfway down the neck of her shirt now and her nipples were hard against the creased, stretched fabric as she tried to fish the pistol magazine out. Joel watched her for a moment and then wisely looked away, bringing one large thigh up to hide his groin from her eyes, just in case. The front of his underwear was slightly more taut that it had been a minute before. He wanted to suck those lovely little tits, suck them until she squealed.

Ellie spread out her empty pistol magazines on the floor in front of her and began to reload them, humming softly. He recognized the song, Pink’s “Please Don’t Leave Me.” It was one that Sarah had sometimes played way too loudly up in her room, on that old silver boom box, the one his mom had given her for Christmas, not knowing what a iPod docking station was but taking her best guess and believing the clerk at the Best Buy who had told her that a big silver boombox was exactly what a teenage girl would want for the holidays, which coincidentally enough, happened to be the exact same unfashionable device he needed to unload from the shelf to make room for newer, better items. He had probably unloaded half his stock of old technology on even older people, well meaning grandparents.

Mom sure meant well, and Sarah acted like it was the greatest gift in the world and exactly the thing she’d asked her grandma for, he remembered. Damn, she was a good kid.

Joel rubbed his broken watch idly, watching Ellie work, listening to her hum that old song. He had a moment of sad realization when the notion occurred to him that all her music was old music. Nobody was making new music, not with the world slowly winding down to a stop.

Poor little thing, he mused to himself. She’s never known anything but a patchwork life. Scraps that she was thankful to get. And it probably ain’t gonna get any better for her.

He thought about praying for strength, praying that he could be a better man and not fuck her life up worse than it already was by doing something he shouldn’t with an underage girl, but this wasn’t a day when he could find any faith to spare.

He sighed, feeling dejected. He’d really gotten them into a mess this time.

And if I fuck her, he thought, that’ll only make things worse in the long run.

But, Lord, I bet she’d sure appreciate it for a while.

Jesus. What do I do?

“I’m hungry,” she said for the third time since they’d taken shelter in here.

“Me too,” he replied, glad for the distraction. “But all the food’s back with the bike. So hush up about it, alright?”

She loaded her last magazine, began to put the plastic tray with its few remaining shells back into the cardboard ammo box. Only six rounds left in this particular pack, but two more full boxes were waiting for her back at the bike, stuffed into one of the cargo boxes.

“Ten-go ham-bray,” she said, smiling just a little, hoping she was pronouncing the Spanish words he’d taught her last week at the Dixie Star Drive-In correctly.

_Serves you right for teaching me to say ‘I’m hungry’ in Spanish, dude._

“Callate,” he replied, leaning his head back against the warm cinder block wall.

“Ki-yah-tay,” she repeated his words, grinning. “Is that Spanish for shut up?”

“Got it on the first try, Red,” he chuckled. “You must be psychic.”

“I am,” she grinned. “Want me to read your mind?”

Oh Christ, kid. You don’t wanna do that, he thought.

“Ain’t nothin’ in there but cuss words right now,” he sighed.

She snickered and put the ammo box and the spare magazines away. She considered sharpening her knife or something. Joel needed time to think and she needed something to do. If she kept pushing him, he’d get pissed at her sooner or later. She decided to try being good for a while. She promised herself she would be as quiet as a mouse.

**. . .**   


It lasted all of three minutes.

“Ugh….” she sighed, laying back on the cool concrete floor dramatically, spreading her arms and legs wide for maximum dramatic effect. She’d tried. She really had. But she was just all out of ‘good girl’ today.

_Even his back is all big and muscle-y. Are those back pecs? Is that what you all those things? Man, he’s so sweaty and shiny. Shit! Why can’t I stop staring at his muscles?_

She groaned again, not content to be ignored. “Augh… This is so boring.”

“Estoy aburrido,” Joel sniffed, massaging his brow with one hand.

“Is toy abba r-r-r-read-o?” she asked, rolling the R with an abundance of enthusiasm. “Something about a burrito? Does that mean you’re hiding food? I love burritos!”

_Please tell me you’re talking about that burrito stuffed down the front of your underwear._

“Or are you planning to eat me later?” she continued, feigning fear overdramatically. “Are we resorting to cannibalism so soon? Jeez, Joel. Can’t we at least talk about this first before you eat me?”

_If you want to eat my pussy, that’d be fine by me. I won’t even try to stop you._

“It means ‘I’m bored’,” he said.

”Ooh! Hey! Me too!” She sat up, remembering something. She began to dig through her backpack excitedly.

“Ellie…” He was getting irritated. Killing time was hard. Killing time with a bored teenage girl was almost impossible. Why couldn’t she just be quiet for a bit? Why did he want to fuck her so much? Why couldn’t she be a couple of years older, for Christ’s sake?

Her stomach growled.

“Hey! Nothing I can do about that. Not my fault.” She continued her search.

“What the hell are you doing, kid?”

“Man! I can’t believe I forgot about this thing!” She dug all the way to the bottom, underneath the Swiss army knife with the cool American flag, below the lavender ‘Steve Miller Band’ shirt she had picked out for herself because she loved the horse and the rainbow on the front of it, beneath the colorful, silly tie-dyed ‘Make Love Not War’ shirt she had picked out for him…

Her hands stopped moving suddenly.

_If I were a good girl, I’d give him this shirt to wear._

She considered it, her hands completely still, for several long seconds.

“Forgot about what?” he asked.

She smiled. Her hands resumed digging in the pack, the shirt pushed aside and out of her mind now.

_Fuck it. I’m going to hell. That old preacher told me that for a fact before I was even ten. Sorry, Joel. You’ll just have to stay shirtless for me, dude._

She found what she was looking for, nestled safely just above the large Ziploc bag holding her treasured collection of Savage Starlight comics and her beloved copy of Playboy. She pulled it out of her pack with a flourish, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

“Tah-dah!”

“What the hell is that?” he asked, looking at the small, black case in her hand. It looked for all the world like a small laptop computer or something.

“Magnetic Chess Set – Travel Size. Collectible Pewter Pieces,” she said, remembering what the sign in the head shop had read. “I have no idea what pewter is, but it looks super fancy so I’m guessing this must be incredibly valuable.”

“You stole a chess set?” he smirked, sitting up, suddenly interested in this conversation again.

”Correction, Joel. I _found_ a chess set. For us.” She beamed, turning it over, opening it up. Rows of tiny, pewter, magnetic-based chess pieces were recessed into the slotted edges around the black and white tiled board. “Proud of me?”

“A little bit, yeah,” he chuckled.

“Will you show me how to play?” She walked over to him on her knees and plopped down close to him, sitting cross-legged, scooting on her butt, getting as close as she dared. She began to set the board up on the floor between them. “Okay! Where do all these little fuckers go?”

“Let’s set it up on the countertop, alright?”

“Ummm. Isn’t it just as comfortable down here?” she asked as innocently as she could manage.

“Squirt,” he said, standing up and going around to the other side of the shop’s service counter, teasing her ponytail in passing, “there ain’t no way I’m setting cross-legged on the floor like that in just my underwear.”

I couldn’t do that to you, kiddo, he thought. I’m not _that_ much of a sonuvabitch.

_Fuck! It’s almost like he read my fucking mind! Shit! That would have been the perfect excuse to keep his man parts in my line of sight for a while. Fuck fuck fuck! I was sure that would work._

“Ah. Good point.” she replied casually, hopping effortlessly to her feet and following him across the room, the chess set in her hands. She turned it upside down, delighting in they way the pieces she had already placed, incorrectly of course, stuck to the board by their little magnetic bases. “Don’t want to expose me to any more Joel junk than you absolutely have to. I have too many nightmares as it is. Thanks for looking out for me.”

“That’ll do, Ellie.”

**. . .**   


“Knight’s don’t move diagonally, Ellie. Put it back where it was.”

“This knight does. He’s a paladin.”

“A what?”

“A paladin. A holy knight. He can move like a bishop cause God told him it’s okay."

"What the hell are you talkin’ about?”

“ _Paladins_. You know, from Dungeons and Dragons, man. Haven’t you played that before?”

“No. I haven’t. We’re playin’ _chess_ , Ellie.”

Ellie had never played Dungeons & Dragons either, but she’d read several of the rulebooks. They were enjoyable, filled with cool pictures and information about magical creatures and long-lost ruins and magic spells and swords and traps and mazes, and screw Riley for saying it was super dorky even by Ellie’s incredibly low standards of coolness. They were fun books, damn it, and if Riley weren’t so obsessed with always being cool, they could have played it and probably had a lot of fun.

“We’re playing old people chess, Joel. I’m trying to bring magic and wonder into it.”

“Nothing to wonder about, girl. Two more moves and I’ve got your king anyway. Might as well concede the game.”

“No way! Not so long as my queen lives! She’s the real power behind the throne,” Ellie giggled. “The king’s just a figurehead that she puts up with because she has to make it as an ambitious woman in a man’s world. It’s complicated love they share, Joel. It started out as a political marriage, one arranged to bring their people together, but over time she grew to love him. And he loves her too, of course.”

“He does, huh? Even though she’s willing to sacrifice him?”

“Of course he does. He’s crazy about her. She’s lot younger than he is, and she’s got a great rack. But he’s old. Look at him! Poor guy can only move one square at a time. That’s why she’s having a secret affair with that much younger, much studlier knight over there. But don’t tell the king. He doesn’t know. And in three more moves, it won’t matter. He’ll be dead and the queen can shack up with the handsome guy on the horse. He’s older than her too, but he’s still plenty sexy and stuff. He’s a studmuffin, dude. Plus, he’s got a _horse_. Every girl loves horses.”

“You put a lot of thought into these little pieces didn’t you?”

“Indeed I did, Sir Joel,” she cooed sweetly. “Don’t even get me started on the sad story of that one, lonely little pawn over there. He didn’t even want to fight in this war. He was drafted right out of the orphanage. He’s cut off from his army and now he’ll never get to see Winnipeg. Fucking tragic, really. Little guy never had a chance.”

**. . .**   


“Three to nothing. Man, you suck,” she lamented. “You could have at least let me win _one game_ , you butthead.”

“You don’t learn anything if somebody _lets_ you win, girl. I’m tryin’ to teach you to play, not strokin’ your ego,” he said flatly, in what she imagined to be a very ‘dad’ tone of voice. “Besides, you ain’t lost this one yet. You could turn it around.”

“My ego could use a _little_ stroking, you know. Every now and then.” She stuck her lip out in a fake pout, put on her best sad face. She hit him full force with the puppy dog eyes, blatant manipulation, leveraging her cuteness for sympathy, a move that had kept her out of the box back at the orphanage more than once. But it was no use. Joel wasn’t budging. She sighed.

“So what happens after you kick my butt again?” she asked. “Another game? While we wait to starve to death in here? Or is it time to rush the door and go out guns blazing?”

“We got a sayin’ down in Texas, kid -”

“Another one?” she interjected. “How many sayings are there down in Texas?”

“Lots. We say ‘don’t shear a pig’.”

She giggled. “Okay, now you’re clearly just making this shit up, cowboy.”

“Means don’t do something you don’t need to if no good will come of it,” he explained patiently. “As much as I’d love to kill that sonofabitch over there on general principle, the plain truth of it that he’s holdin’ most of the cards, yeah? So we wait until it gets dark and try to sneak out without being seen. He wants this town, he can keep it.“

“And then we just ride to Wyoming with you in your underwear? This is not a bad plan, Joel, but it’s gonna be chilly when we hit the highway.” She grinned impishly.

“Shut it, Red. That bastard clearly ain’t in any hurry to rush this place in the daylight. But who knows what he’s got up his sleeve when night falls. He sure don’t want us over here settin’ up house as his new neighbors. So we gotta skedaddle and soon. We just need to wait till the sun’s about to set.”

“Skedaddle,” she giggled.

She was pretty damn adorable, this girl. He wished for the umpteenth time that she were just a few years older or younger. This ‘in-between’ stuff was killing him. Every time she stood on the old milk crate she’d dragged in here from the garage, and raised herself up on her tiptoes to lean over the board, trying to get a bird’s eye view of the pieces (as though that would somehow give her some sort of game-winning insight), he had to look away. The neck of the long-sleeved, dingy white San Diego State University shirt that she had found in Kristi Chau’s collection was just a little too big, a little too loose. And he didn’t need to look down the open collar of her t-shirt at the small, splendid breasts hanging there, swaying gently inside her shirt as she shifted her weight from one graceful arm to the other, pondering, always pondering. He didn’t need to see her, didn’t need to see them. Not again, not after that first time that her small but inviting breasts had caught his eye, blindsiding him with their sudden appearance during her first, unexpected ‘satellite surveillance’.

He swallowed hard, the memory still too fresh in his mind. He really didn’t mean to look, and sure as hell not for near as long as he had. He gripped the edge of the countertop, knuckles turning white, trying not to think about it… about her… about the creamy white skin of her breasts, her trim little belly visible just beyond those lovely little peaks, in the warm shadows of the white shirt. He remembered a hint of rosy pink at the tips, almost hidden by the white cotton framing them like a picture. Small, tantalizing circles of pink, almost hidden, but not quite. He felt himself growing hard inside his underwear and tried to breathe slowly, steadily.

Goddamnit, why do I keep thinking about her like this? Jesus, when the fuck am I gonna to get to Wyoming? It’s gotta be soon, lord. Real soon.

She studied the board, one finger tapping on her round little bump of a chin.

“There’s gotta be a way out of this…” she muttered to herself. She placed both hands flat on the countertop and stepped up onto the milk crate. She levered herself up to the balls of her feet, leaning forward sharply at the waist to look down at the board from directly overhead. “This calls for satellite surveillance again.”

Her breasts jiggled inside her shirt as she settled her weight onto her hands and Joel became hard behind the counter. He stepped a little closer to the side of the formica countertop, to the safety of concealment.

Jesus, she’s killing me.

“Hmmm…” she mumbled. She looked up at him suddenly, just as his eyes were drifting towards her bewitchingly exposed flesh. Their eyes locked. She smirked. Her eyebrows pulled together slyly, as though he had fallen into a trap he hadn’t seen coming.

“Ah ha!” she said, her lips curled in a vengeful, satisfied smile. “Gotcha!”

Oh Christ, she knows. God! She knows I’ve been looking at her tits.

“Ellie –“ he began, ready to explain this away however he could.

“I see you looking all guilty over there, buddy boy,” she said smugly, almost sadistically. “You feel bad about crushing me over and over. Well you should! My ego is in a million tiny pieces thanks to you. But I’m coming back. Oh yeah. Don’t doubt me. You’re _going down_ this time, Joel. This time Ellie conquers all. My new strategy is _unbeatable_.”

She stabbed one slender finger at him for emphasis, her breasts jiggling inside her shirt as she did so. He saw them from the corner of his eyes and wished he couldn’t. His hard dick began to pulse with desire for her and knew he had to focus his mind on something else and quickly. If he stayed this excited, he would start leaking precum. And how would he be able to explain away a dark, wet spot on the front of his underwear?

“Is that a fact?” he snorted, crossing his arms and tilting his head, cocky as hell, just the way she liked him. His body relaxed, a slow wave of relief spreading out through his tense muscles. She hadn’t seen. He was in the clear. Or would be, just as soon as his dick would start listening to him again.

She turned her attention back to the small chessboard. His eyes sought the vista of her lovely little breasts again, almost involuntarily. He clenched his teeth and ordered his unruly eyes to watch what she was doing with her hands instead.

“What you didn’t know…” she began, her delicate fingers plucking her fallen pawns from the place on the countertop where he had placed them earlier. “… Is that my queen is actually a powerful necromancer.”

“A what?”

“A necromancer,” she repeated, as though it was a word everyone would know. “And she’s using her knowledge of the dark arts to raise an army of undead pawns.”

One by one, she began to place the tiny pewter pawns back on the magnetic board. Several of them were his pawns. Necromancers weren’t picky, apparently.

“Ellie. It don’t work like tha–“

“Behold!” she said, snapping her head up to look at him, pure condescension on her pretty face. “My zombie army has arisen! The dark gods are commanding you to suck it, Joel! That’s what you get for letting me play the black army. Black magic, bitches!! AAHH-WOOO!!”

She howled like an adorable little wolf in anticipation of her imminent victory, still bent forward at the waist, slapping her hands on the table in triumph, her lovely, elfin breasts swinging freely inside her shirt, just at the edge of his vision. His cock, which had been slowly softening behind the counter, swelled to life again at the sight of them.

Goddammit. I’m going to be trapped behind this counter all day.

“Quiet, Ellie!” he hissed. “You want them bangin’ at the window again?”

“Shit! Sorry!” She was chagrined. She bit her lip, her delicate features twisted up with regret and shame. She whispered, as though that would balance things out. “I forgot! Fuck! Do you think they heard?”

Infected began pound on the door and the thick, unbreakable plexiglass. Joel grimaced and tuned them out. It was amazing what you could get used to in this world.

“Let’s just finish the game,” he sighed.

She offered up another apology, wordlessly, using only the regretful expression on her face.

_Stop acting like a stupid kid, Ellie. Don’t fuck this up!_

**. . .**   


She helped him braid the long extension cords together, weaving them into a sturdy orange rope. Three lengthy orange power cords were stretched across the floor of the shop’s garage, slowly being woven together to make a single, stronger cord. It was like braiding hair and she was much faster at it then he was. She was surprised that he knew how to braid anything; not knowing about Sarah and the skills a single dad can learn when he has to. She was brimming with energy. He had finally told her his plan and she was thrilled that she was going to be such an important part of it. She was humming her way through her third guitar solo since they had started making this rope together.

“Come on, Joel,” she urged, waiting for him to hand her the next length of cord. “Let’s pick up the pace, you big loser.”

“I didn’t lose,” he insisted. “You cheated.”

“You can tell me that zombie pawns aren’t allowed in chess all you want, Joel,” she crowed, taking the handful of cords and weaving into the long braid shaping up on the floor of the shop. She passed another length back to him. “But you didn’t stop me from using them, so they’re in the game forever now. New rule.”

“‘Didn’t stop’…“ he began, “I _gave up_ tryin’ to stop you. You wouldn’t stop tryin’ to sneak them back onto the board. I couldn’t take my eyes off you for a second!”

And I had to find some way to keep you from needing to use your damn satellite imagery anymore, he thought, still eaten up with guilt for all the lecherous glances he had sent down her shirt earlier.

I can’t fuck this kid. I _can’t_. It’d break her heart in the long run. Break her heart… make her sick to her stomach, once she was a little older, and looked back on what we’d done.

“No no,” she chided. “Those were _ninjas_ , dude. Completely different rule.”

“Ninjas? When the hell were there ninjas on the board? You didn’t say a damn thing about ninjas.”

“Ninjas don’t announce their presence, Joel. They were in disguise. As zombies.”

The tight braid of orange power cords was completed. He stepped on a length of it and tugged at it, testing the strength. It would do the trick. He began to duct tape the end, keeping the braid tight.

“Yeah. This will work,” he said.

“Cool.” She scampered across the floor to the other end of the braid. She giggled as she went. “Thanks for helping me. I can always count on you, my faithful sidekick.”

“I swear, girl,” he chuckled, knowing he shouldn’t encourage her. “You are all hat and no cattle.”

“That another weird thing they say down in Texas?” she asked, mimicking him, testing the durability of the braided cords at her end. She held it in place with her foot and tugged as hard as her modest arm muscles would allow. “Looks good down here too.”

She took out her own roll of tape and secured her end of the braid.

_What he does, you do. Can’t go wrong with that._

_So stop sneaking peeks at him, Ellie. He’s not doing that to you, so stop being a perv._

She sighed as she made the last few, tight loops with the tape before tearing it off.

_I know, I know, Inner Voice. I’m trying. I really am. But I can’t seem to stop myself. I don’t know what’s wrong with me._

_You’re horny, boo._

_Fuck yes, I am. I really, really am. I’m horny for him all the fucking time now. Shit, things were a lot easier when I was only into girls._

“Almost time, kid. You ready?”

“Pfft. I was born ready, sidekick.”

**. . .**   


The large, roll-around tool chest was blue, not red. And it was much taller and wider than the more compact, red Snap-on toolbox she’d seen earlier that day. But the design was similar. She helped Joel push it into place. They blocked the chest’s wheels from moving by using their backpacks as improvised chocks. He climbed up, unaware that her eyes were on his most interesting places as he did so, and stood on the top of the cabinet. She passed the small stepladder up to him. There was just enough room on the top of the tall tool chest for him to place it securely. She held the tool chest steady while he climbed to the top of the short ladder. She had just enough time to sneak one more quick glance at his man stuff before he looked down at her and signaled her to climb up. Hoisting one end of the braided extension cord over her narrow shoulder, she climbed up as carefully as she could.

_Don’t look at his dick, don’t look at his dick, don’t look at his dick…_

“Easy,” he said, his big hands steadying her as she clambered up the side of the toolbox and carefully made her way up the ladder to stand next to him. There was very little room at the top, and she had to press close to him to make it work.

_Jesus, you are one naked, sexy man, Joel._

“Snug the end of the cord on the ladder and I’ll boost you up, okay?”

“Gotcha.”

She bent down at the waist carefully, not wanting to fall and trying as hard as she could to ignore the protruding jut of cotton-wrapped man parts so close to her face, and looped the end of the orange braid around the hinge of the stepladder, making sure it was snug. She didn’t want it to come loose or else she’d have to go down and get it and start her ascent up Miller Mountain all over again. She straightened up and held her arms open at her side, ready for him to lift her up.

“Ready, Joel.”

He stooped as low as he could, wrapping her lower thighs up in his arms. She shuddered faintly, her breath catching in her throat, hoping he didn’t notice. She was almost giddy.

“Here we go,” he said, lifting her up.

Secure in his arms, she took the flathead screwdriver out her back pocket and reached up for the vent cover of the big air duct above her. She strained and stretched, grunting. It was almost but not quite too far away.

“Just… a little… more…” she grunted.

“Alright.” He lifted her as high as he could without overbalancing the ladder. They wobbled for one terrifying second and then his big feet found just the right spot on the ladder’s top rung. They were as steady as a flagpole after that. They both breathed a sigh of relief before he spoke again. “That’s all I got, Red. Be careful. Don’t get wiggly on me now.”

“It’s a deal,” she said, her voice trembling. This could be a very bad fall.

She stretched her arm as far as it would go, tried to maneuver the tip of the tool into the narrow little slot of the first fastener. It took several stabs before she got it lined up just right.

“S-sorry,” she grunted. “Going… as fast… as I… can…”

“Take your time, Ellie. Just don’t squirm. We don’t wanna fall and break a leg or somethin’.”

“Right. Okay. Sorry if I’m too heavy,” she said, her voice strained a bit by the way she was stretching her body to its maximum length. “I’m working as fast as I can. Don’t drop me.”

“Ellie, you don’t weigh nothin’, girl.” He chuckled. “I could hold you up here all day.”

She smiled and her stomach did a small loop-the-loop. She was twisting the screws and unlocking the latches as fast as she could, but she hoped at least one of them would give her a little trouble so she could stay in his arms for just a few minutes longer.

_Man, he’s so damn strong. Fuck! I feel like a teeny ballerina up here._

“Cool beans,” she said. It was the only way she could think of to express how sexy and impressive she was finding him. She knew it wasn’t enough, but calling him ‘Captain Muscles J. Thundercock’ seemed a bit much. She was too distracted by her own horniness to find a middle ground. Cool beans would have to suffice.

_If you only knew how much you’re turning me on right now, Captain Thundercock._

Her thighs were pressed close to his face, the small denim triangle of her crotch warm and inviting near his temple. He was thinking thoughts very similar to hers, and praying his dick would behave itself for just a few more minutes. He hoped none of those screws would give her any trouble. The heat from her hidden, warm pussy was so close to his face; it was taking all of his willpower to keep himself from becoming erect. But he knew he couldn’t hold out forever.

Please let this go off without a hitch, he prayed.

“Oh crap,” she grunted. “This one doesn’t want to turn.”

_Sweet._

Ah hell, he thought.

**. . .**   


The vent hung open from its hinges. Her shoes disappeared into the darkness of the ductwork, the length of the orange cable trailing along behind her, clutched tightly in her hand.

“How’s it look?” he asked, looking up into the open hatch.

From inside the duct, there was a faint click and her flashlight came to life.

“Eeeww,” she said, “it’s filthy in here. Grody. It’s, like, twenty different colors of spray paint in here.”

“It’s an exhaust fan duct, girl,” he said. “Of course it’s dirty. They used to paint cars in here. Can you see the way up?”

“Sure. It’s right over there. Gimme a second, okay?” Her small voice echoed inside the sheet metal tunnel.

The duct flexed and groaned as she crawled along. His eyes were very worried, following her unseen progress, watching the sheet metal passage groan and creak and she worked her way down the length of the big air duct up near the high ceiling of the two-story garage. As she crawled along, dust fell from the edges of each stamped metal brace that held the ductwork to the ceiling. The thin metal bars creaked softly as her weight passed over them.

His fists clenched, his stomach was a roiling pit. He ground his teeth together.

If that damn thing tears loose from the ceiling… if those screws don’t hold… if she falls from that height…

The orange cord followed her along, rising up from its coil on the floor, disappearing into the darkness as she worked her way to the end, where the ductwork took a ninety degree turn straight up to the ceiling.

“Made it!” Her voice was very faint, echoing and bouncing down the duct to him, filtering down from the open vent. She was alone in the darkness and he couldn’t get to her if she needed him. He unclenched his jaw and forced himself to sound as relaxed as he could.

“Can you reach the grille? Can you get up to the roof?”

“I… think so…” her distant, echoing voice responded.

A few seconds passed.

“Nope,” she said. “Too far away… I can’t reach that high.”

Shit, he thought. Don’t exactly have too many options for a Plan B. The back parking lot has the big clicker stomping around. The street outside the front door is crawling with infected. What the hell else can I do…? Think, Joel. Think!

“Hang on,” her voice echoed out to him, small and far away. “Lemme see if I can figure something out.”

**. . .**   


The words came bouncing down the long, rectangular metal duct, and found her standing in the tight confines of the metal shaft, sweating in the hot air beneath the exhaust fan, glad to have the late evening daylight shining down on her dirty face.

“Be careful, Ellie.”

His deep voice sounded strange to her ears, and not just because of the way the metal tunnel distorted it, making it sound like a robot’s voice or something. It took her a moment to figure out what had changed.

There was more concern in his voice that she normally heard.

She smiled. He cared. She loved how warm it made her feel to know that.

“I will. Sit tight. I totally got this,” she called back to him, reassuringly.

The vent and the large, three-bladed fan mounted overhead were just beyond her reach, just two or three inches further away than her outstretched fingers could manage.

_Come on, Ellie. Joel’s counting on you. Get up there. We have to get out of this place before Bill Junior next door decides to burn this place down. Figure it out! Hurry!_

She braced her back against the grimy metal and placed her shoes against the opposite wall. Half inch by half inch, she worked her way up the duct, bracing herself with her burning legs. The painkillers from this morning had worn off an hour ago.

_Gonna feel this tomorrow._

_I feel like Santa trying to squeeze his fat ass up a chimney. Getting down’s gotta be the easy part._

She inched her way up to the fan. It was mounted onto the roof on the outside of the unit. There was no way she could remove it and it was so big, that if she could get it loose, it would fall down into the duct and smush her flat. She braced her aching legs and her back against the metal walls surrounding her to hold herself in place for a while, and focused her efforts of the slatted grille beyond it.

“How’s it comin’, girl?” Joel’s voice was very far away and for some reason, she felt a tiny, cold swell of fear in her gut at the realization of just how separated they were from each other.

“I think I’ve got it,” she said, shouting down into the tunnel below her, legs protesting as she held herself in place. “Gimme a minute, okay?”

“Working as fast as I can, Joel,” she whispered to the reddening sky on the other side of the vent above. “Keep your panties on. Jeez.”

_Or take them off. That’d be good to. It’s not like I haven’t already seen your dinghy, my Captain._

She snickered and pulled the black mesh on the inside of the vent loose. It reminded her of the fly screen on the windows of the big common room in the orphanage that she used to share with Riley, the room with the pool table and the foosball game.

_I wish you were here right now, Riley. You were a fucking cat burglar when it came to stuff like this. You probably would’ve saved me and him both by now if you were here._

_Oh man. And then we could’ve banged him together. How awesome would that’ve been? It'd be less scary if you were there, I know that for sure._

The vent was fastened from the outside. But there were little brackets inside that held the hinge of the vent in place, allowing you to flip it up like a lid. She took the Phillips screwdriver from her pocket and began to remove the brackets holding the hinge in place.

“There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” she said, repeating one of Joel’s more bizarre sayings. It was gross, the notion of skinning a poor kitty, but maybe there were just too many cats down in Texas. Maybe they made gloves out of them or something. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. Texas sounded like a weird place, sometimes.

The small screws fell out, one by one. Each little bracket came loose, clattering loudly on the sheet metal below her. The sound rang harshly in the steel enclosure of the duct.

“Ellie!” Joel’s voice was louder than before. “Get out of there! It’s comin’ loose!”

“That’s just me! I’m taking the vent cover apart!” she shouted back. “It’s cool! I promise!”

“Thank Christ,” she heard him say faintly. The words probably weren’t meant for her ears. It made her smile. Not too many adults had ever given a crap about her and none of them had genuinely cared for her, not like he did. Even if he tried to hide it.

_I’m gonna throw so much sex at you one of these days, Joel. Just wait and see. I’m getting you out of those underwear, buddy, even if I gotta set them on fire to make it happen. You and me? We are going to set some kind of world record for fucking. I promise._

She giggled as quietly as she could and removed the last of the screws. It was going to be a very tight squeeze getting past those fan blades, but she was certain she could do it. Being small and sneaky were her primary contributions to this team, but now she was about to add skinny to the list.

_Finally! Being scrawny is about to pay off. Riley and her big boobs would never be able to squeeze through here._

**. . .**   


The night air was very cool on her sweaty skin. The long-sleeved white t-shirt was dirty, stained with old paint and soaked with sweat, the dampness chilling the skin of her back as a stiff breeze blew across the roof of the garage. It felt great to be outside, even if she was all alone up here. It felt weird not to have her backpack on though. It was a familiar presence that she missed acutely.

She was missing Joel even more.

“Almost… almost…” she whispered to herself, spinning the flathead screwdriver in her nimble hands, thankful that Joel had told her to take more than one kind when she set out on this adventure. She kept her voice soft, doubtful that the crazy bastard across the way could hear her all the way over here, and she was taking great pains to stay as low as she could, so he wouldn’t be able to see her up here. After the day she’d have, she just wanted to get Joel and get the hell out of this town. “There! Got it!”

The last screw holding the Plexiglas panel of the garage skylight in place fell out of its little hole. She jammed the edge of the flathead screwdriver into the thin gap around the frame and pried it up. Joel was standing down there, looking up, sexy and worried all at the same time.

“Hey, stranger,” she waved, smiling, talking a bit too loudly. “Long time, no see.”

“Everything okay up there?” he asked, his voice a low husk. He knew she needed to be quiet and this was his way of letting her know without correcting her outright. She appreciated that and was happy to take the hint.

“No sign of him on the pawnshop roof,” she said, trying to keep her voice low, just loud enough to carry down to him. “But that big clicker is still wandering around. He looks like a piece of rabbit meat that fell in the campfire. It's pretty gross!”

She made a face. The clicker was disgusting, even from up here, and she wasn’t looking forward to seeing that thing up close. But they would have to retrieve Joel’s backpack before getting the fuck out of this shitty town.

“Pass down the cord,” Joel hissed, “and I’ll send your backpack and our guns up.”

“Okay. Here it comes.”

**. . .**   


It felt good to have her backpack on again. It had felt even better to watch Joel climb his way up that cord to the roof… hand over hand… muscles all sweaty and flexing. She smiled, filing that memory away for future use.

_The way he grunted and strained and stuff. Man, I’m getting some serious mileage out that when I get under the blanket later._

The cord was secured to the same air conditioner unit support leg that she had tied it to earlier, using the knot he had taught her before sending her up here. Joel draped the cord over the side of the building, lowering it down to the street below.

“Any sign of him?” Joel asked.

“Nope. There’s a light on inside the store. I think he’s in there.” She looked up from her sniper’s perch on the edge of the roof. She had been watching the roof very carefully through the scope of the Winchester. “But it’s dark, so I can’t say for sure.”

“Okay then,” he whispered. “C’mon over here.”

She scampered over to him, staying low. They were almost out of here. She kept her fingers crossed that nothing else would go wrong.

“I’m going down first,” he said. “You follow then we’ll meet over behind that yellow DHL van. Okay?”

“Shouldn’t I go first? We can’t see the street from up here. There might be glass or who knows what down there!”

“Ellie –“

“You’re not wearing shoes, Joel,” she said, making her best ‘what the fuck is wrong with you’ face. “Shit, you’re not even wearing pants! Let me go first!”

“Don’t worry about me, Ellie.”

“ _But I do! Okay?_ If you step on some sharp metal or a broken bottle, what the hell am I supposed to do? Carry you back to the bike?” she pleaded. “Let me go first, okay? I’ll pick up the trash and clear a path for you and stuff. _Come on_ , Joel.”

“Have you even climbed down a rope before?” he demanded, his voice husky, his jaw set. This was his way of ending this conversation.

“Joel! Don’t insult me, dude!” she hooked a thumb at herself, her eyes flashing in the dim light. This was a personal affront to her. “I’m a juvenile fucking delinquent! I was trained by the baddest bad girl in dorm T-1. Oh-ho, I’ve climbed ropes, buddy!”

**. . .**   


Joel looked down as he eased his hips to the edge of the building, the braided orange cords gripped tightly in his hands, the concrete rough under his ass as he sat there waiting as patiently as he could. Ellie was barely visible on the dark street below, darting this way and that, picking up trash quickly and quietly placing out of the way, clearing a ‘landing zone’ for him, as she insisted on calling it. He didn’t like her being down there without him but she was right. Getting himself hobbled by a broken beer bottle in the darkness wouldn’t do either one of them much good.

She sure handled that rope like a champ, he thought. She might not have much strength in her arms, but she sure knows how to use her knees and feet to squeeze the rope and let her legs take her weight. She scooted down that rope like a squirrel down a tree. After how she struggled with that chain link fence this morning, I would’ve bet she wasn’t much for climbing. I gotta rethink my opinion of that girl. There’s more to her than I thought.

Below on the sidewalk, Ellie looked up and used both hands to silently wave a big ‘come on down’ signal to him. He took a deep breath and went over the side. The brick surface was rough and unpleasant against his bare feet and he slowly and quietly walked his way down the wall to her, the braided cord secure in his hands.

She was waiting for him when he reached the sidewalk. She was smiling impishly. He thought it was because she had showed him how well she could climb a rope. She knew it was because she’d had a great view of his large, sinewy back and his tight, compact butt.

She stood on her tiptoes, one small hand on his chest to steady herself, pressed closed against him, and whispered into his ear, her voice so faint that he could barely make out the words. With so many infected on the streets and one crazy person hiding in the pawnshop, she wasn’t taking any chances.

“We gotta be careful,” she said in her softest whisper, her soft lips almost brushing his cheek, her warm breath in his ear making his flaccid member twitch in the tight confines of his underwear. “There’s a whole bunch of them around the corner, in the front of the paint store. And that big one is still on the other side of this fence.”

As if on cue, the big charred clicker still stumbling its way around the confines of the small parking lot between the pawnshop and the custom wheels garage moaned softly, stumbling into the chain link fence, invisible to its soft, almost pathetic clicks. The fence rattled and shook. Joel and Ellie crouched reflexively.

_I could almost feel sorry for it. Does it know it’s in pain?_

Ellie was a safe and welcome presence under his arm. She passed him the shotgun that he had sent down earlier. Neither of them said a word or moved a muscle until the seared and blackened thing slowly stumbled away, still looking for a way out of the small parking lot. Joel took deep steady breaths. The combination of danger, her warm body snug against him, and his near nudity was sending all the wrong signals to the parts of him still concealed by clothing. He knew he couldn’t let her suspect what he was feeling for her. She was too much of a kid.

Ellie shuddered. She feared and pitied the scorched monster in almost equal measure. Wordlessly, Joel squeezed her shoulder to reassure her. She smiled at him in the dim light, her eyes almost shy. He was still very, very naked against her and she hadn’t had much experience with that sort of thing yet. Her nipples were hard and tingling. A warm fire was slowly being stoked in her belly. She wanted to let him know what she was feeling for him. She wanted to tell him so much it made her chest feel tight.

She leaned close to him again, her lips hovering near his ear.

“I’m going to clear a path to the van. Stay put, okay? Please?”

He nodded reluctantly, turned to face her. She turned her head to give him her ear, exposing her slender, smooth neck to him as he leaned close, the whiskers of his beard tickling her skin as he whispered to her. Electric tingles arced out from her pussy, charging her body.

_Oh fuck, that feels so good._

“Be careful, kiddo. Watch yourself.”

She wanted desperately for him to place those lips on her skin.

He wanted to taste the salty sweetness of her graceful neck.

Neither of them knew how the other felt. Both made every effort to hide their desires.

She slipped away with a shy smile and crept into the darkness, carefully clearing a the sidewalk of broken glass and dangerous trash as she went. Joel waited on the sidewalk, in the partial cover of an old cardboard box. Someone had slept in here once, a long time ago. Scraps of an old life were everywhere. An old, broken disposable lighter. An empty, rumpled pack of Camel cigarettes. Several empty pistol cartridges. An empty can of tuna. An old bottle of Dugga’s vodka with several cigarette butts lying at the bottom of the container. A cracked plastic spork from some cheap fast food joint. A battered and water-damaged issue of Hustler magazine, open to a photo spread of a balloon-breasted blonde getting double-teamed by two men.

Thank Christ she didn’t see that, he thought. I can’t even imagine what a girl her age would make of such a thing.

An image of Tommy and himself sharing Alexa in that Pine Bluff hotel, during a winter a dozen years in the past, flickered through his mind. He tried to shove the memory away, but Alexa was replaced by Ellie before he could.

Don’t even think about that, you old fucker, he thought to himself. Tommy never minded if they were a little too young. Remember America Esparza? Remember her younger sister, Liberty? Ain’t no way that girl was eighteen. Tommy didn’t care. He fucked her anyway. Hell, if he was horny enough, even Ellie might be old enough for him.

She’s old enough for you, his cock whispered to him. Don’t pretend she ain’t, buddy. I know better.

She’s old enough. And she wants me inside her. She’d _beg_ for it.

You could train her, teach her to do it just the way you like it. You know I’m right, Joel. Hell, she _wants_ to be trained. She’s ready for it.

He grimaced and looked around, trying to find something to distract him from the uncomfortable truths bouncing around inside his mind.

On the outside flap of the box, someone, the previous owner maybe, had written ‘All Hail The Mushroom King!’ next to a cartoon drawing of a naked man with a long, mushroom shaped erection and an even larger mushroom for a head. The fungus man was about to fuck a FEDRA soldier in the ass. The trooper was on all fours with his pants around his ankles and looked eager for what was about to happen. A speech balloon was next to his head. He was saying ‘I fucked all of you and now it’s my turn!’

Joel had to smile at that. The person who had lived here was no Picasso, but Joel could admire the statement he had made with his art.

Yeah, he thought, fuck FEDRA.

He looked around, the street was still clear. The soft clicking of a few infected could be heard distantly, from around the side of the building, out on the front sidewalk, but none of them were making their way towards the alley. From the sound of things, they were standing still and resting, the cordyceps equivalent of sleep.

Where the fuck is she, he wondered. Not a peep, not a sound of any kind since she set out for the van.

He sighed unhappily.

He knew sneaking up behind her in the dark was a recipe for getting shot by the very same pistol that he had given to her back in Pittsburgh.

Damn it, girl. Get back here. Come on.

Another long moment spent waiting, crouched behind the old box, and Joel had reached the limits of his patience.

“Sonuvabitch,” he muttered and began to work his way towards the van, towards his missing friend.

A small path had been picked clean along the cluttered sidewalk. Bits of glass and sharp pieces of rusty metal lay off to the sides. She had come this way. He paused, waited a moment, halfway to the van now. He peered into the darkness. No sign of her. No sound but the night wind and the soft, resonant clicks of the blackened clicker still stumbling around inside the prison of the small parking lot. Joel frowned.

Is she clearing a path all the fucking way Wyoming, he wondered. How far up ahead has she gone? Goddammit, Ellie. Why can’t you just do what I ask you to do? Why do you have to test the limits all the time?

He grimaced, knowing the answer.

Because she’s a fucking teenager, he reminded himself. And that’s why you shouldn’t be wanting to fuck her. She’s just a kid, you sick bastard. She tries to act all grownup but she ain’t. She’s just a girl and you’re thinking about doing things to her that you oughta be ashamed about. You’d scare the life outta her if she knew where your head’s at some days. Jesus, what’s wrong with you, Joel?

He ground his teeth, weighing the risks of pushing forward versus staying put and waiting for her to come back to him.

“Ellie!” he hissed, trying to keep it low enough that it wouldn’t alert the clicker somewhere in the darkness on the other side of the fence.

No response.

Fuck it, he thought. She can be trusted with a gun. Ellie won’t just shoot at a sound in the darkness. She won’t shoot me, I know she won’t.

He stalked forward, staying low, his bare feet silent on the concrete.

Moving slowly and quietly, it took him almost a minute to reach the bumper of the van. The trash around here hadn’t been moved aside. He only barely avoided putting his foot down on the butt end of broken beer bottle, dark brown glass almost invisible in the near-darkness. There was no sign that Ellie has passed this way.

Oh shit, he thought. Where the fuck did she go? I didn’t hear anything. No gunshots, no scuffling.

He looked back the way he’d come, in the direction of the old box, which was now impossible to see in the darkness. Had she circled around? Had they passed each other in the dark without knowin-

The length of bailing wire slipped around his neck before he could realize what was happening.

The arms holding the garrote were strong, but they’d come at their prey at a bad angle, making the most of the small window of opportunity the marauder had when Joel turned to look back down the street, and the other corner of the van’s bumper was no longer in his field of vision. Joel had just enough time to drop the shotgun and slip a few fingers between the wire and his neck before it was pulled taut, digging into his skin painfully. The big Texan twisted and turned, trying to get some traction, but his bare feet could find no purchase on the concrete sidewalk. He was at a bad angle and slowly being tipped backwards. Darkness swirled at the edge of his vision. He tried to push back against the man behind him, the edge of the curb digging into his tailbone, hoping to gain some kind of reprieve from the strangling wire. But it backfired badly.

The man went back with Joel’s head against his belly, controlling the movement, hooking his fists behind Joel’s ears and yanking back, forcing Joel to come back with him or let his throat be crushed. The concrete was rough and gritty beneath his bare skin. Bits of gravel and glass dug into the skin of his lower back. His feet slipped and scrabbled uselessly against the pavement beneath the edge of the sidewalk. Dark spots began to blot of the world.

The man was older than Joel, his breath coming in harsh, rapid wheezes, distorted by the gasmask he was wearing. Joel knew he had to use his greater strength before this old fucker choked him out this world. He pushed back with all the reserves of his remaining strength, trying to lift the old bastard off the sidewalk. If he could just roll him over…

The marauder was wise to this trick. He had used it himself as a younger man, during the last days when the survivor camps here began to turn on one another. He let himself be turned just a little, just enough for him wrap one of his legs around Joel’s waist and begin to kick at the big Texan’s balls with the heel of his combat boot.

Joel screamed deep inside his closed off throat, a choked, strangled sound that died halfway to his mouth. The world spun, grew dark, grew silent, grew still. Something warm and wet splashed across his face and Joel was gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the continuity minded among you, the Esparza sisters, America and Liberty, were mentioned in volume one, chapter twelve. Alexa appears in chapter seventeen of the same volume.
> 
> Ridgid Tools have been making quality calendars since 1935. Raquel Welch began her career as a pinup girl for them.
> 
> Speaking of cheesecake, I wanted to get Joel stripped down to his skivvies for several reasons. One, because Joel is a nice slice of beefcake and I’ve already treated the readers to several descriptions of the physical attributes of Tess, Ellie, and a couple of OCs. Two, because I recently watched Return of the Jedi for the first time in ages and was struck by something I had never really noticed before. Han Solo gets captured and gets a nice nap in a big, comfy block of carbonite. Princess Leia gets captured and she gets a skimpy brass bikini, a leash, and public humiliation (meow!). In a perfect world, Solo would have been locked into a crystal clear block wearing a speedo (or at least he’d be shirtless) so everyone could see his body too, right? ;-)
> 
> Am I the only one who wanted Joel to teach Ellie how to play chess? They set it up in the game like it’s going to pay off eventually, but nope, it never happens. Of all the cool things in Ellie’s backpack, I really, really want to find a little travel chess set, maybe using a couple of empty shell casings as pawns because she lost a few. So this story was written to relieve me of that burning need. I also added other kinds of fan service as well, but nobody cares about Joel in his underwear, Ellie’s cleavage, prominent erections, or the long-simmering attraction that’s slowly coming to a boil between our two heroes. Nope, you guys don’t want sexy stuff, you people are here to read about chess games. And I was happy to deliver! You are welcome.
> 
> For the non-Texans out there, to say that somebody is “all hat and no cattle” means that they brag too much and probably can’t back their words up.
> 
> Now that Joel is probably dead and gone, come back next time to see what sort of wacky adventures our favorite girl gets up to in Chapter Thirteen: Change of Key.


	13. Change of Key

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sarah and Joel spend a lazy Saturday evening together.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
 **Chapter 13 – Change of Key**

 

The lock needed to be lubricated. It didn’t want to let his key in and if he ever managed to jam the damn thing in there, it wouldn’t want to let it out either. The old lock had been that way for at least a week now. Joel had promised himself every day that he would stop by the hardware store on his way home and buy a little bottle of graphite. But just like every other day this week, by the time he had packed his tools away and made the drive from the construction site over at Somerville down Highway 290 to home, he had forgotten all about it.

“Sonofabitch,” he muttered. If he pushed the key any harder, he might bend the fucking thing. “How the fuck do I keep forgettin’ to do this?”

A few feet down the porch, a small face appeared in corner of the large window.

“Uncle Tommy? Is that you? Did you bring the booze and the hookers?” Sarah asked, her voice muffled by the glass. “Oh. It’s you. Hey, Dad.“

“Sarah, honey,” Joel said with some relief, “can you open the door?”

“Okay. But it’s gonna get awkward in a minute when Uncle Tommy shows up with the floozies and the moonshine.”

She disappeared from view and a moment later the knob rattled as she unlocked the door from her side. It swung open and Joel relaxed internally. He was home.

“You’re home early,” she said, smiling warmly.

He tousled her hair and teased her as he stepped inside. “Moonshine, huh?”

“Sounded funnier that whiskey,” she grinned, closing the door and following him across the living room, her socked feet padding lightly across the rugs covering the hardwood floor. The days were getting cooler. She was wearing jeans and her old Lost Pines Elementary school sweatshirt. Her long blonde hair was loose and draped down her back, halfway to her waist. She had wanted to cut it short over the summer, but Joel had managed to talk her out of it. For now it was still a lovely gold cascade. “How was work?”

“It’s work,” Joel sighed, settling down on the dark brown leather sofa. He looked for the remote but stopped when he saw the PlayStation was on.

A small campsite had been set up on the big rug in front of the new TV. A cold can of Sprite, a snack-sized bag of Funyuns, and Resident Evil 5. Sarah had been enjoying her lazy Saturday afternoon. Healthy food during the week. Junk food only on the weekends. She was following the rules. The game was paused and, from the look of things, Sheva had just blasted several zombies into meaty bits as Joel had pulled into the driveway.

He sighed, seeing trouble ahead. “That game’ll give you nightmares, baby girl.”

“Pfft. It will not,” she said with sweet defiance as she settled in next to him.

“Yeah, it did. The first night you played it. And don’t deny it.”

“Because I played it too close to bedtime,” she argued, pressing the side of her head into his chest gently, angling for a hug. “This is the middle of the day. I’ll be fine.”

“Wish Tommy had bought you something else for your birthday,” he groused, slipping his arm around her small shoulders and giving her a loving squeeze.

“Barbie’s Horse Adventures?” she giggled.

“You loved that game,” he said wistfully, wishing she could stay little for just a little longer. She was too young to be killing zombies.

“I was eight,” she snickered, sliding out of his hug, her need for fatherly affection temporarily sated. She trotted across the room and returned to her game. “Lookin’ back on it, I’m kinda troubled by how good _you_ were at that game, Dad.”

“I ruled at that game, baby girl,” he said with a certain note of smugness. “And don’t you forget it.”

“I’m _tryin’_ to forget it,” she teased. “But it’s stuck in my head. Not sure any man should be so crazy good at a Barbie game the way you are.”

He chuckled and thought about all the stairs between his tired legs and the upstairs shower.

“You’ve got epic Barbie skills, dad. I’m impressed,” she giggled, her back to him as she dropped to the floor and resumed her game. “I don’t tell my friends, of course, ‘cause I don’t want to become a social outcast. But between you and me, your Barbie skills are pretty dang amazin’. I’m impressed. Embarrassed, but impressed.”

“I could still find those missin’ horses in my sleep,” he said proudly, stretching out, closing his eyes, knowing he needed a shower, but too tired to care. He was home, the lights were on, the bills were paid, and Sarah was fed. All was right with the world.

“You have to work tomorrow, dad?”

He didn’t open his eyes. “Nope. It’s Sunday. I don’t work on Sunday unless I have to.”

The speakers flanking the TV began to pump out a wild cacophony of noise. Joel eased one eye open. Sheva was in the back of a Humvee, roaring across the African plains, being pursued by biker zombies now.

”Ugh. I hate turret sections,” Sarah grumped. Sheva began to mow the bikers down with the Hummer’s machine gun.

“You are way too young for that game,” he sighed, too tired to fight this battle again. He made a mental note to talk to his brother about what was appropriate for a girl her age.

“Uh huh,” she said, mostly ignoring him. “We goin’ to church in the mornin’?”

“Yep. No sleepin’ in for you tomorrow, little girl.”

“There go my wild party plans tonight, I guess.”

“Yep. Tommy’ll have to handle the moonshine and the floozies on his own.”

She giggled. Something in the game exploded loudly. Sheva’s machine gun continued to fire. A long moment of white noise followed. Joel began to drift. His stomach growled.

“Hungry? Want me to make you a sandwich?” she asked, her young ears attuned to him even as she ripped apart the biker gang on the screen. She was a good daughter.

“Dinnertime’s almost here. I reckon I can hold out ‘till then,” he yawned.

“Suit yourself,” she said. “But if you starve to death, I’m goin’ out partyin’ tonight. Just thought you oughta know that.”

“You ate somethin’ better than those chips for lunch, I hope,” he mumbled.

“Apple and a PBJ,” she said, focused intently on the game. “And we’re almost out of jelly.”

“Grape?” he asked, yawning again. “Or strawberry?”

“Ugh. Grape is the _only_ jelly, Dad,” she said with mock disgust.

“If you say so,” he mumbled. If he rolled over, he would go to sleep. He was sure of it.

“Wanna co-op with me, Dad? I got the second controller plugged in and ready to go.”

He didn’t want to. He wanted to take a nap. Framing that two-story house with four guys instead of six was hard work. And the damn job was all the way over in Somerville. And he didn’t like video games. And he especially didn’t like these new games that were so complicated only young kids like her or big kids like Tommy could figure out all the goddamn controls. But he knew Sarah would be gone before long. First boys, then college, then a family of her own. He sighed at how fast time was getting away from him.

“Maybe after dinner, okay?”

“Awesome,” she chirped, delighted. “You can play Chris.”

“Got anything besides zombies? How about Jak and Daxter?”

“Or Barbie?” she giggled. “Oh! We could play FIFA 13! I want to play that! Can we?”

He sat up. If he fell asleep, she would let him nap. And he wanted to spend time with her.

“I swear, baby girl. Don’t you get enough soccer in the real world?”

“I love football.”

“Soccer,” he corrected.

“Football,” she insisted playfully. “Don’t mix it up with your so-called ‘Murican football. Nope. I’m talkin’ about _real_ football, Dad. Not that phony NFL crud.”

He chuckled. “Don’t blaspheme in this house, girl.”

She blew air through puckered lips. “Pssht. I don’t even know why I keep you around, I swear.”

He slid to one end of the sofa, leaving plenty of room for her to join him when she tired of the game. “No sport that can end in a tie is gonna prepare anybody for the real world.”

“Me encanta futbol.” Her accent was exaggerated and deep, mimicking one her friend’s dad, a volunteer coach. Joel recognized the voice right away.

“I don’t even want to think about the shape the world’s gonna be in when you kids are old enough to start runnin’ things.”

“Viva la revolucion!” She whooped. “Now c’mon, dad. Quit bein’ a pain in the butt and get down here with me.”

“On the floor? I’m too old for sittin’ on the floor, baby girl.”

She looked back over her shoulder at him. The screen read ‘You Are Dead’ in large, red letters. Sheva had died tragically young, once again. “Whine whine whine. You ain’t _that_ old, Dad. Heck, half my friend’s moms have crushes on you.”

Joel tilted his head in challenge, smirking. “That a fact?”

She giggled and turned her attention back to the console. She switched it off. “Yep. But I ain’t tellin’ you which ones.”

“Fine. Be a brat,” Joel laughed gruffly as she continued.

“Most of ‘em are divorced. But a few ain’t. That’s the only clue you’re gettin’.”

“All right then,” he replied with a smile and a shake of his head.

She hopped to her feet nimbly and crossed the room to sit beside him.

“I think one of the dad’s has a crush on you too,” she continued. “But I figured you didn’t want to know about that one.”

Joel chuckled again. “I hope Karen’s mom is one.”

Her eyes twinkled and she grinned impishly. “Maybe it’s Karen’s dad.”

He shook his head and sighed with bemusement. “That wouldn’t surprise me none.”

“Ha! Me either!” She cackled. “I figure it’s only a matter of time before he runs off with some guy, right?”

Joel laughed, wiped his hands on his jeans, and yawned. “Hell… I shouldn’t joke. At least they’ve managed to stay together. Not many folks can say that these days.”

Sarah studied her father for a moment, trying to read his mood. “Not your fault what happened to mom.”

“I know, Sarah,” he sighed. This was not a conversation he wanted to have. He should have chosen his words more carefully.

She hugged him around the neck and spoke softly. “Love you.”

“Thanks, baby girl.”

Sarah whispered into his ear with exaggerated seriousness. “It’s Sabina’s mom.”

She giggled and settled in next to him, her knees drawn up to her chest.

“Mrs. Palomares?” He was not displeased with this revelation.

“ _Miss_ Palomares. Sabina’s parents divorced over the summer.”

“They did? I didn’t know that.” He tried to hide his smile. He didn’t want to encourage Sarah into playing matchmaker for her lonely dad.

“And her name is Josefina…” Sarah said, nudging his thigh with her foot, smiling sweetly, almost shyly. “You know. Just in case. If you’re _interested_ , I mean.”

“I’m not. … Not that she ain’t pretty. But lord knows I don’t have time for that sort of thing.”

Sarah rolled her eyes and sighed melodramatically, pretending to bear the weight of the world upon her shoulders. “Is it _me?_ Am I crampin’ your style, Dad? Is your only child puttin’ a big dent in your social life?”

“You and your soccer games do have a way of fillin’ up my dance card,” he chuckled. “Plus you never stop askin’ for all that silly stuff you teenage girls can’t seem to get by without: clothes, food, hot water. It never ends, I swear.”

Sarah nodded knowingly, solemnly. “One of these days, you’re gonna leave me on the side of the road, ain’t ya? Or just never come pick me up from soccer practice. Leave me standin’ there in the parkin’ lot, all alone in the world, like a hobo.”

“Nah. You’d just find your way home eventually. Figure one of these days I might put you in a bag and throw you off the side of the bridge, maybe.”

She shoved him and squealed. “ _I knew it!_ You’ve been plannin’ on gettin’ rid of me!”

“You’re on to me, baby girl. Shoulda listened to Tommy and dropped you off at the train station’s ‘Lost and Found’ box right from the start. He told me that waitin’ ten years to lull you into a false sense of security was a mistake.”

“Oh my _God_ , Dad!” Sarah groaned, extending her ring finger at him, the closest he would allow her to get to giving someone the actually finger. “I’m _eleven_ , thank you. Figured you’d know how old your _own daughter_ was, but I guess I set the bar too high for you.”

Joel tried to keep a smile from creeping onto his face. “I can’t keep track of you and all your birthdays. Seems like you never stop havin’ ‘em. You’re probably gonna want to have another one pretty soon.”

Sarah did her best not to giggle but struggled keeping the mirth out of her high voice. “Dang right, I am. Around June, like I usually do. In case you wanna write it down.”

Joel put on his best grumpy dad voice. “Knowin’ how you are, you’re probably gonna want presents and stuff too. _Again_. I swear, girl. It just never stops with you.”

Sarah giggled hard and snorted, just a little. “Keep this up and I won’t go easy on you when we play FIFA after dinner. I’ll make you play York. Heck, my piggy bank’s got more money than they do.”

She leaned against him, brimming with joy, her belly warm with snacks and love. She adored her dad. She wanted another hug. He draped his arm around her shoulder again.

She pressed her face into his chest and sniffed loudly. “Dang, you stink. Who told you you could stink up my house like this?”

“Sure am gonna miss you when you run off to join the circus,” Joel sighed affectionately, tired from a long week of work. “Maybe you can get a job bein’ shot out of a cannon. Or sweepin’ up the elephant turds.”

“You’re a turd,” the young girl snickered. “I’d be a trapeze artist, dad. Soy un acróbata.”

“Uh huh.” Joel yawned. “My daughter the acrobat.”

“Mi padre es carpintero.”

“Your daddy is tired, girl.”

Sarah looked up at him from her place nuzzled against his chest. Her eyes twinkled. “Too tired to teach me some more guitar?”

Joel brightened at this. “Now you’re talkin’ my language, honey.”

Sarah hopped up from the couch and dashed across the room to get his acoustic guitar from its stand beside the television. She didn’t know it yet, but Joel had been putting aside money for a Squier Mini Strat electric guitar. Smaller than a full size, it would be a perfect fit for a young student like Sarah. Electric guitars were better to learn on anyway, and easier for small hands to play. Joel was already bracing himself for hours and hours of sour notes and simple chords played with boundless gusto. Tommy had already agreed to buy the amp. It was going to be a great Christmas for Sarah.

Joel sat up and leaned back, making room for his daughter as she climbed onto his lap, his treasured Fender in her tiny hands. Nobody touched that guitar, not even his own brother. But he was content to let Sarah leave Funyan-tinged fingerprints all over his seven hundred dollar beauty. He hoped that as she got older and grew into a young woman, a shared love of music could help bridge the gap between them during the turbulent teenage years to come.

She settled back against him and her delicate fingers found their place on the frets of the rosewood fingerboard.

“Same song as last time?” she asked

“Yep,” he replied, his arms coming around her and the guitar, ready to provide demonstrations when called upon. “E minor.”

“I know,” she said, her fingers almost but not quite in the right spot. “Second fret… Like this, right?”

“Third finger on the third string, honey.”

“Crud,” she sighed, disappointed in herself. Not even begun, and already she had made a simple mistake. “Okay… Better?”

“Yep. Just like that.” He peered over her shoulder, his eyes studying her left hand. One day, he knew, there would be a wedding ring on one of those little fingers. He already dreaded letting her go. “Now do you remember how to split ‘em?”

“Like… this…” she said, her brow furrowed with concentration. She wanted to get this right for him. “Right?”

He looked, reached out, adjusted one of her errant fingers just a little, putting it in the proper place.

“Like that.”

“Got it,” she said. She turned her head sharply to look at him from the corner of her eye. “Ready?”

“Whenever you are, baby girl.”

She began to play ‘A Horse With No Name’, an easy song for anyone to learn, consisting as it did of just two chords. She strummed the strings, haltingly at first, but with enough joy to gloss over any seams left in the tempo by her uncertain fingers. She beamed a bright smile, bobbing her head as she went; making the music her father had taught her. It was a small taste of Heaven. The chain of the little gold crucifix around her neck caught the light coming in from the sliding glass door.

Joel hummed the melody as she played, his large hand slapping his knee lightly to keep time. Sarah softly sang the lyrics to herself as she went.

“‘There were plants and birds and rocks and things… There was sand and hills and rings…’” She giggled. “This is a really silly song, daddy.”

“Hippies,” he shrugged, as though that single word explained everything. It made her grin.

“Hippies,” she repeated.

Her small head dipped and swayed from side to side as she played. Her long blonde hair would be gone by next summer. She wanted to get it cut short for a change and he knew that he wouldn’t be able to talk her out of it forever. He was going to miss that wonderful hair, a gift from her dead mother, overdosed and gone more than eight years now, her body left in the corner of a trash-strewn room in a dilapidated house that she had shared with the same worthless friends that had convinced her that being a mom was the last thing a true free spirit needed in this life. The damn needle was still in her rotting arm when the police arrived, called by neighbors who couldn’t stand the smell of decay anymore. The drugs and the friends were nowhere to be found. Free spirits.

He was raising Sarah a bit too ‘free range’ to suit his mom, but he was raising her with good morals and good values. She was a good kid. And she would turn out just fine. He was sure of it.

“‘After nine days, I let the horse run free,’” Sarah sang from the cradle of her father’s lap, content and cherished and loved. “‘Cause the desert had turned to sea…’”

He brushed her blonde hair out of the way of his face so he could keep an eye on her fingers. She was really getting the hang of this song. It would be time to move on to something more challenging soon.

“‘The ocean is a desert with its life underground’,” she sang, her nimble fingers almost dancing on the frets now. She grinned deviously, changing the next few lyrics, hoping to make her dad smile. “And this is a silly, silly song.”

“No comments from the peanut gallery,” he chuckled.

She giggled again. It was a funny thing to say. Her grandma sometimes said the same thing, usually to Uncle Tommy when he was in a funny mood and feeling pretty full of himself. She didn’t know the origin of the phrase. Neither did Joel. It was just something that was said in their family. She was sure she’d say it to her own kids one day. She hoped it would make them laugh too. She wanted to be a mom one day. A mom that would be there for her kids. Not that her dad wasn’t doing a great job, as far as she was concerned. But having a mom around would be really nice too.

“‘I was lookin’ at a river bed’,” she sang. “‘And the story it told of a river that flowed, made me sad to think it was dead.’”

One day, she knew, her dad would give her away. She would be wearing a beautiful white dress and everyone she knew would be in attendance at the church to see her get married.

It was easy to let her mind drift. The song was simple, and she had fallen into the groove of it. Her dad was singing softly behind her, his deep baritone a nice bed for her higher, lilting voice.

Michael Scott. That’s who she would like to marry, she decided. She had his album, and his poster on her wall. He was a guitarist too, like her dad, and like her – or like she was going to be, once she finished with these lessons. They could all play guitar together. Maybe get Uncle Tommy to play too, when he wasn’t chasing college girls.

She smiled at the thought. That would be a pretty cool life.

“‘It felt good to be out of the rain’,” she sang, her mind made up. She had decided. Her life was going to be awesome. Simple as that.

But she didn’t want it to happen too soon. She wanted to spend a few more years with her dad first.

“‘La la lalalala’,” they sang together, father and daughter, safe and sound in their happy home. “‘La la la laaa la’…”

The future could wait. She wouldn’t be a kid forever, she knew, but there was still plenty of time for stuff like this first. She was sure of it.

So was Joel.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love that Tommy gave Resident Evil 5 to an eleven year old. Rated M for ‘More Fun’, right? I’m an uncle. It’s just the sort of gift that I love to give. I also love to get the kids jacked up on sugar and caffeine before taking them back home and dropping them off with their parents as I drive off into the sunset.
> 
> America’s classic song “A Horse With No Name” is really easy to learn, but that second chord is bizarre.
> 
> So far as I know, Michael Scott isn’t a real musician. But the poster for his album, “Catch You Later” can be found in Sarah’s room. I toyed with the idea of giving her a crush on a real pop star, but I figure that maybe Sarah’s into the local scene, you know?
> 
> Also, the original version of this chapter was quite a bit different. I’ll post it as part of the “tidbits and snippets” collection after I’ve finished the main story with volume three.
> 
> Lastly, for the record, I’m not a big fan of Resident Evil 5. I like Sheva, but it’s almost impossible to beat the game if you play as her. That button mashing thing at the end is enough to make your thumb go numb permanently. Yeesh. Whoever put that into the game should be smacked upside the head.
> 
> Come back in a few days and we’ll see what Ellie is up to in Chapter Fourteen: Redoubt.


	14. Redoubt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter fourteen, in which we learn if Joel survived the ambush behind the pawnshop.  
> (SPOILERS: He did.)

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 14 – Redoubt**

 

The girl’s mouth was warm and wet around his cock. She sucked him with more skill than he expected her to possess. For a little kid, she sure knew her way around a dick. Tess had taught her every trick in the book, even that thing she did that always drove him crazy. He shuddered as the girl attempted it, her slick pink tongue swirling around and around the head of his cock, cradled safely inside the girl’s mouth, plump young lips sealed tightly around the head of it, holding him inside as she tried the technique Tess had taught her. The older woman lay alongside him, encouraging the girl who curled up cutely between his legs, coaxing the kid and talking her through the more complicated maneuverings. She praised the kid’s efforts with tender words and gentle strokes of her head. Starved for affection and approval as she was, the girl became even more enthusiastic about pleasing him. He groaned, swore softly, his hips pushing his cock deeper into her mouth. She didn’t gag on it, though she struggled a bit. She was just a girl. He knew he should go easier on her. She was new at this, and too young for it, really. But she was so eager to please and so willing to do anything the adults asked her to do. Tess purred lusty words into his ear, teasing him about how much he was enjoying this. Didn’t he have any shame? Didn’t he feel guilty about making a little girl do this? But he knew he wasn’t making her do anything. She wanted this. She loved making him happy. Her mother was dead. She needed someone to love her. He knew that he could ask her to perform any act, no matter how degrading, and she would do it with a happy heart. Anything. Just for a few kind words. Everything. Just for a friendly pat on the head. Pitiful. Pathetic. He knew he should stop her, send her away or something, before he recklessly filled her mouth with hot jets of come, before he defiled her, stole whatever scraps of dignity she still possessed. But Tess wouldn’t let him. She had spent too much time training her. The woman stroked the girl’s head again, long fingers combing their way through silken locks. The girl tried to smile, looking up at them both, but her mouth was too filled with him. Her eyes sparkled instead. She was doing good and they were letting her know it. She was happy. He groaned again. Tess whispered to him, telling him that he loved it. He did. He wanted to kiss her. They had been partners for years. But the fungus was spreading across her face. Already one eye had been pushed aside by the thick, ropey stalk emerging from the socket. Soft, fuzzy tufts of white were growing around her ears. Thin vein-like growths wove their way across her cheekbone, having grown out from the ruined shell of her ear. Beneath the skin of her forehead and the bridge of her hose, he could see the lumps of cordyceps beginning to swell and distend her face. Already a stalker, Tess would be a clicker soon enough. Her sinus cavity was packed with the parasite. The bone wouldn’t be able to keep the fungus from erupting for much longer. Tess was almost gone. But in the time she had left, she was going to make sure this girl was ready to take her place. She petted the kid again, coaxing a purr from her. The vibrations emanating from the kid’s throat raced down the cock in her mouth and drew a long, shuddering groan from him. With a voice deep and hoarse, he told her what a good girl she was. She let the hard cock slide out of her mouth with an obscene slurping noise. She giggled and looked up at him, her small hands stroking his hard shaft as she spoke.

“I love you, Daddy.”

Small hands slapped lightly at his face. He tried to push them away, but his arms didn’t want to work properly. They flopped around at his sides, not at all what he was trying to make them do.

“Fuckin’ wake up already!” a high, soft voice whispered in his ear. Small hands began to swat at him again.

“Whuh –“ he croaked, his voice raw and unsteady and much too loud. The nightmare wouldn’t let him go.

The small hands clamped down on his mouth, stifling his words. A familiar, copper taste. Blood. A distant clicking noise. A cold, familiar fear pooling in his gut.

“Shhh!” she hissed, her forehead so low it was almost touching his. “ _Be. Quiet._ ”

His eyes were open, he realized, but everything was blurry, too close and too far away at the same time. Dirty white skin, clean red hair, streaks of every color of paint on her dingy white shirt. She’d crawled through an air duct, he remembered. Her breath was quick and hot on his face. It smelled like peanut butter. He didn’t remember having any. He wanted to ask her where she’d come by it, but her hands were still pressing down over his mouth. She’d tell him about the power bar she’d found in the dead man’s pocket later, when they weren’t in so much fucking danger.

“ _Quiet_ ,” she repeated, softly but harshly. “Okay?”

He nodded, the world still blurry and far away. She moved her hands, slid them to rest on his cheeks. Her face was sick with worry.

“You scared the shit out of me, Joel,” she hissed. “I’m not kidding! I almost crapped my pants, you ass!”

He tried to sit up but that was a terrible idea. His head exploding with fireworks, he lay back down against her slowly cooling body.

No, not her body, he realized dumbly. The old man’s body. He was still lying against him.

“You killed him?” Joel croaked.

“Duh. Who else?” she snarked gently, rubbing his cheek affectionately. “We were circling each other around the van. I was quicker than he was, so he could never catch me out in the open. I was trying to figure out a way to distract him when you showed up and I had to save your chivalrous ass.” She smiled, sure she had got the word right this time. She bent low and teased him lovingly. “Couldn’t stay put, could you? I swear, Joel. You never mind me, do you? You’re the worst sidekick.”

“Comin’ to look for you,” he wheezed, wanting to lie here all night, despite his survival instincts telling him he had to get up and right fucking now. She wouldn’t let anything sneak up on them and he needed a minute before he could get his feet under him again. In his mind, the quickly fading dream was still playing out its obscene tableau. He could still feel Tess beside him, laying in her big bed, but in his bedroom for some reason. A girl was between his legs. His cock was in her mouth. Tess was infected and turning but he didn’t care. He was getting sucked off. That was all that had mattered. His cock yearned to return to that dream. His mind was disgusted with him. The details were fading fast, but not quickly enough. There was something about the girl in the dream. Something wrong. Very wrong. But he couldn’t remember what it was.

“I know. That’s how you always are. You’re all brave and stuff, and always looking out for me,” Ellie whispered, smiling down at him warmly. “And I’m glad you showed up, because I was out of ideas and sick of playing Ring-Around-The-Rosie with this turd burglar. Cut his throat while his attention was on you. Pretty fucking gross, by the way. You’ve got his blood all over your face. Sorry.”

“S’alright,” he rasped. He could hear the burnt clicker shuffling around just a few feet away, making yet another circuit around the parking lot, still fumbling for a way out. Fortunately, the old marauder had jumped him on the far side of the van, leaving Joel and the dead man sprawled on the sidewalk, mostly tucked away from the senses of the scorched monster.

“Can you sit up?”

He tried, groaned, shook his head as she covered his mouth with her small hand again. More fireworks inside his head, though less intense than before. He needed another minute for the world to stop exploding before he could try again.

“No rush,” she cooed, smiling with relief, glad to have him back. She knelt close, bent low, her small, bloody hand on his check. “But you’re gonna want to pull your underwear up when you get the chance.”

He looked up, his eyes filled with worry. He wheezed softly. “ _Again?_ ”

“Yeah, they’re snagged on the storm drain down there by your ankles. Sorry, but your ding dong’s out, buddy. Second time today,” she whispered, giving him her best sympathetic ‘what are you gonna do’ look. “I figure we’ll just put Lil’ Joel on the ‘do not talk about’ list with the tampons and stuff. Maybe pencil it in somewhere between your days as a hunter and my days as a dormitory lesbian love slave. Deal?”

“Sure,” he groaned, chagrinned, but too tired to do anything about it now. It was too late anyway. If she wanted to look at it, she’d had plenty of time to do it before he woke up.

Another moment passed. Two. Three. His senses began to clear, he only felt like he was going to lose consciousness once, briefly. She never left his side.

His eyes opened. His expression was uncertain. Had he dreamed those words?

”Wait. What did you say about the dormitory?” he groaned weakly.

“Shhh,” she whispered, grinning. “We don’t talk about the list, remember?”

She giggled as he struggled to sit up, fumbling with clumsy fingers for the waistband of his poor, battered Fruit of the Looms. The effects of the strangulation combined with his dirty dream were very apparent, he realized as he reached down. He was fully erect. He knew she must have seen it. There was no way she could have missed it.

“Oh, Jesus,” he lamented, deeply unsettled. “S-sorry, Ellie. I didn’t know I was…”

“We’re not talking about that, remember?” she said, not giggling at all, and doing her best to appear to be a reassuring, non-groping partner. “No harm, no foul, big guy.”

In the darkness, behind him, where he couldn’t see, she smiled widely at her pun. If she had touched it while he was out cold, however brief and shameless that contact might have been, she would never say. Some things you just had to keep to yourself.

**. . .**

The dead man had the keys to his pawnshop in his pockets. He’d had an old peanut butter and chocolate power bar too, but Ellie had eaten that while she was waiting for Joel to wake up. She had confessed to it as they snuck around the old van and made their way to the parking lot, her nimble fingers tossing dangerous trash out of the way for her friend. She felt that she had to confess to _something_ , so she might as well admit to that.

She sure seems guilty about something, Joel mused.

“Sorry,” she whispered, “I should have shared it. That was a real asshole thing for me to do. Sorry. Seriously. I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Don’t worry about it, kid,” Joel hissed. “Now get ready.”

“I am.”

He had three empty beer bottles that they’d scrounged up in the alley. The big, burned clicker was still in the small parking lot the pawnshop shared with the custom car shop. It had finally stopped moving, slipping into a state of rest that passed for a sleep cycle among the infected. But standing so close to the old, purple Monte Carlo parked back here, the big clicker was practically on top of his backpack. Ellie had kicked it over there earlier, during their brief firefight with the bastard who now lay dead in the alley. They would have to get that pack back before they could leave this town.

“Be careful,” Joel whispered.

“I will.” Ellie nodded and smiled. She loved this man. It wouldn’t do to die tonight before she could tell him that, so she knew she’d better not fuck this up.

_Grab the backpack… get the boots… get back before the monster turns around…_

Joel prepared to throw the bottle. When it smashed against brick wall of the car shop, the old clicker would rouse from its rest cycle and move to investigate the noise. Ellie would have just enough time to get his pack. Two more bottles. Two more distractions. Enough to buy her the time to collect his boots too. Hopefully.

Ellie took a deep breath.

_Grab the backpack… get the boots…_

Joel threw the bottle.

 

* * *

 

The key ring had a dozen or more small keys on it, the kind for padlocks and lockers, but only two house keys. Joel and Ellie crouched by the front door of the old pawnshop. With the charred clicker riled up and stomping around the enclosed lot behind the store, still trying to figure out who had thrown all those damn bottles a few minutes ago, Joel had decided the front door was the safer option.

It was a decision that saved his life.

Crouched low in the darkness of the front parking lot, he eased the key into the deadbolt lock and turned it. The heavy door with the steel mesh and thick bars opened easily. The shatterproof glass had been spray painted black from the inside, hiding the interior of the store from the outside world. A small lamp sat on the glass countertop. Hooked to a battery, the little forty-watt bulb cast a soft glow across the expanse of the main showroom. The stale odor of the previous inhabitant still hung thickly in the air. The old man had been living alone in here a long time.

“Oh fuck, Joel,” Ellie whispered into his ear. She was peering over his shoulder, trying to get a look at the wonders this place was sure to hold for an imaginative kid like her. She hadn’t expected to see two barrels of a shotgun pointed directly at her.

“Yeah,” Joel said flatly, chagrined to have been caught with his pants down (so to speak). “Burglar alarm.”

The sawed-off twelve gauge with its side by side barrels was secured to a cinder block with duct tape. The block was itself strapped tightly by several old leather belts to a five gallon plastic bucket filled with sand. A length of wire was tied to the double triggers of the scattergun and looped around to a small pulley mounted to the nearby wall. The end of the wire ran down from that pulley and rested on the floor, a small hook attached to the end of it. The door had a small eye bolt screwed into it to hold the hooked wire. If it had been attached when Joel had opened the door, the wire around the triggers would have been pulled tight and the gun would have ripped him apart at the knees.

“Dollars to donuts that there’s a rig just like that one set up at the back door too,” Joel said. “We just used up a whole mess of our luck, kiddo.”

“‘Dollars to’…” Ellie teased in his ear, shaking her head at the absurdity of the phrase. “You Texans say so many cute things.”

“Be extra careful lookin’ around in here, Ellie.”

“I reckon I will,” she drawled.

**. . .**

There were wires strung low and tight in every hallway, ready to trip unfamiliar legs. There were wooden boards with long, wicked nails driven up through them on the ground under every window, waiting to hobble anyone who tried to come in that way. Razorblades had been jammed into window frame, ready for any fingers that might come reaching in.

“Guess he didn’t host too many tea parties,” Ellie remarked.

“No,” Joel agreed with a chuckle. “Not too many slumber parties goin’ on here these days.”

“You know, I always wanted to go to one of those,” Ellie said, brightening at the thought of such a luxury. The fanciful notion helped her to cope with the recent end of The Naked Joel Show. “You ever go to one, Joel?”

“Slumber party?” Joel responded, tucking his old gray t-shirt in. “Nah. Those are more of a teenage girl thing.”

“Oh… yeah… Of course.” Ellie sounded a bit embarrassed at her gaffe. So much of her knowledge about the past had been cobbled together from fragments. “So… um… what did teenage _boys_ do?”

“Snuck into slumber parties,” he smirked, “and tried to kiss all the pretty girls before the parents caught us.”

Ellie laughed. “That sounds fun.”

“It was, girl. Believe me, it was.”

Joel sat down on the countertop and considered which of the musty, cluttered rooms to search first. Ellie rested her hip on the edge of the display case next to him.

“Y’know,” she began as innocently as she could, “I’m having a hard time picturing you as a teenage boy, sneaking into people’s homes and smooching their daughters.”

Joel chuckled. A deep, masculine sound that sent a small tremor of pleasure rippling through Ellie.

“I raised my share of hell, girl.” He smiled at a faraway memory. “Stole my share of kisses too.”

“No kidding?” Ellie smiled at him, blushing in the warm light of the little lamp. She wanted to lean in just a little closer, but her nerve failed her. “That’s pretty cool, Joel.”

He looked at her. In the soft light, he seemed half his age. For a few heartbeats, he seemed to be sizing Ellie up.

What’s he thinking about? … He’s obviously thinking about… something.

“Rebecca Conger,” he said with a funny half smile. “That was the name of the first girl I ever kissed. I was fourteen. She was at Paige Tyson’s house, just down the street from my house. It was Paige’s birthday.”

Ellie grinned. “Did you sneak in through the window?”

“Came in through the laundry room, actually.”

The teenager giggled. “Did you get caught?”

“Not that time,” Joel chuckled. “Wasn’t always so lucky. But I got away clean that night.”

Ellie gazed into his eyes. She wanted to get lost in him, to dive deep into her love for him. She wanted to kiss him so much her chest ached.

“Wish you could have seen the world the way it was,” he sighed, tired, sore, and glad to be alive at the end of this shitty day. “You woulda loved it.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, a bit glumly, and looked at her shoes.

A silence fell over the room. They let it hang there awhile, content to let things go unspoken for a bit.

The place would prove to be a treasure trove before the night was over, not on par with the garage turned bunker back in Johnstown, but a nice haul nonetheless. Canned meat. Dried fruit. Ammunition. An army surplus backpack, like new, green, with lots of pockets and pouches. A big improvement over Joel’s old canvas one, held together with duct tape and now stinking of gasoline. A nice leather jacket for Joel too. Their packs would be stuffed full. Ellie wasn’t one to be needlessly greedy, but sometimes life stopped shitting on you long enough to fill your pockets and then some. She knew enough to make the most of it while she could. They would pack as much of this stuff as they could into the cargo compartments of the Honda.

But that was still in the near future. At the moment, they stood there in silence, each with struggling silently their own thoughts, more alike in that than they might suspect.

“I’ve never kissed a boy,” Ellie said at last. “I hope I get the chance… one of these days.”

She looked at him, but he was looking away at nothing in particular, that strange expression still on his face. He was considering… something.

They spent the night in the pawnshop. The next morning, they carried as much gasoline as they could from the drums inside the backroom to the waiting bike, still hidden away safely at the edge of town.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stephanie was the name of the first girl I kissed.
> 
> Anyhoo, Joel finally has some clothes again, including that leather coat he wears later in the game, and a new backpack (the military pack – my personal favorite, because I own one almost identical to it), so it’s time to get these two back on the road and continue their journey to Wyoming. 
> 
> Drop by in a few days when Ellie and Joel cross the Mississippi River in Chapter Fifteen: The Toll.


	15. The Toll

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No one crosses the bridge for free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Make a sandwich and get a big glass of something refreshing to drink. This extra-long chapter is a real doorstop.
> 
> Also, I have some crazy hours scheduled to work over the next couple of weeks. I'll do my best to keep to the schedule for updates, but just in case one goes up a day early or a day late, now you'll know why.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 15 – The Toll**

 

“Holy cow, Joel. Look at the size of that river!”

“You’re lookin’ at the mighty Mississippi River, kid. Biggest river in the world, I think.”

From her place of concealment in the small clump of trees atop a low hill, Elli peered through the scope of the Winchester and marveled at the impressive bridge spanning the majestic river. She couldn’t help but notice the small city on the far side of the bridge. Thin columns of smoke rose up from several of the buildings. There were people there. A lot of them.

“Are we going to go around it? Look for a different bridge over the river? Like the last one… the… uh…”

“Wabash. And no, there ain’t no shortcuts over the Ol’ Mississip. And no out of-the-way little bridges neither. We gottta go across this one right here. The only other bridge I know of that’s safe to use is all the way down in Arkansas. Five hundred miles south, at least. This is where we cross, kiddo.”

“Is this place safe? There were hunters back at the Wabash.”

“I hope so. It used to be. When I was on the road with Tommy, Burlington was a free city. Safe to visit, or so I heard back then. This won’t be like Pittsburgh. Don’t fret.”

“No hunters? No army? How do they keep the infected away? You said shanty towns always drew them, right??”

Joel took a long pull from his almost empty canteen before speaking. This was going to be a mouthful.

“That place up there is a little more sizeable than some rinky dink shanty town, Ellie. Burlington was going to be a QZ, but just like Columbus, it was never finished. But people found their way here and this town just sort of… happened. The army always talked about getting’ around to cleanin’ this place out or bombin’ it, but with so few bridges left, no one had the guts to pull the trigger on blowin’ it up. It’s what kept these people safe from the government, I reckon. And now it’s sort of a trading post, I guess you could say, like the one down in Arkansas. Lots of people from all over are here, comin’ and goin’ and buyin’ and sellin’. They got scouts and lookouts all over the place. They’re probably watchin’ us right now.”

“Really?” Ellie said, looking about, scanning the trees and hills around them. This was not a welcome thought. “That’s kind of… creepy.”

“Yeah. But the QZs keep lookouts too. That way they always have a heads up if a big mess of infected gets too close. Or if a bunch of hunters decide to set up a camp too close,” Joel said, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder comfortingly. “And just like Boston, I bet this place has a big pit or two around here somewhere to burn the bodies.”

“Jeez,” Ellie said, the corners of her mouth turning down in a frown. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

“It is,” Joel said, hoping he was right and doing his best to convince Ellie that he knew for certain what he was talking about. “They’d prefer we don’t stay long and we won’t. Just don’t make any trouble while we’re there. “

“I won’t. I’ll follow your lead, dude.”

“Good. And keep your eyes open all the time. You can get robbed blind in a place like this and you won’t even know it for an hour. It’s like the Wild West or something in there, kiddo.”

“Cowboy stuff? Gunfights and saloons and stuff? Cool.”

“No, it ain’t. This ain’t like back at Bill’s, okay? You give somebody here the finger and there’s gonna be a fight. Understand?”

“Gotcha.“

“I’m not kiddin’, Ellie. Behave yourself today.“

“Jeez, _I will_. I swear, okay?”

“Alright then. Just stick close to me and don’t draw any attention. Everybody there minds their own business and they’ll expect us to do the same, yeah?”

He walked down the hill, back towards the hidden Honda, Ellie close at his heels.

**. . .**

The road up to the bridge was blocked by big, rusted vehicles parked in crazy zig-zag patterns that looped all at the way around to the edge of the bridge itself. Coiled loops of concertina razor wire added to the formidableness of the barricades. This would be a difficult fortification to attack, on foot or in a vehicle.

There was a pair of humvees there, turreted machine guns ready, unsettlingly like the one that had chased them around Pittsburgh almost three weeks ago.

There was a tank parked there too, a small one, the sort that carried small fire teams of soldiers. It reminded Ellie of the Bradley IFVs she had seen in Boston. But this vehicle was different. She had never seen a tank like it before. Neither had Joel.

Long and sleek, resting on eight large tires, bristling with antennas, spot lights, smoke launchers. The bulk of the thing was comprised of heavy armor plates painted in a woodland camo pattern, most of the flat surface area covered with affixed panels comprised of a rigid grid of metal bars in a tight pattern, camo netting woven into the gaps between the bars to break up the shape of the vehicle. Joel had seen something like it before on army tanks in the ruins of San Antonio, after the Texas Uprising. Cage armor, Big Matt had called it, designed to foil bazookas or something. The autocannon of the compact turret faced the highway that the Honda was riding along. The top hatch was open and the man sticking out of it had his eyes fixed on Joel and Ellie. The heavy machine gun mounted next to the hatch was fixed on them as well. His hands were ready on the grips of the weapon. There were three more armed vehicles, one of them just like this one, waiting along the span of the bridge, though Joel and Ellie hadn’t seen them yet.

They couldn’t see them by design. They were reinforcements, hiding, waiting. Being prepared to bring more violence to a fight than the other guy could was the only way to hold on to what you had in this world. Burlington was still in the hands of those that had set up this town years before and it would stay that way. More than one would-be king or hopeful liberator Firefly had tried to wrest it away from the people here down through the years. All of them had died horribly and publicly, when that could be arranged. No one had tried to conquer or liberate Burlington for almost six years now. Word had a way of getting around even now, even with all the phone lines down.

It was a checkpoint. Several men stood watch, automatic rifles in their hands, pouches of ammo on their belts. Body armor. Helmets. Gas masks. Light, reflective vests of bright orange, the kind that road crews used to wear when the roads were still being maintained. A city guard of some sort.

A framework for highway signs was suspended over the wide lanes of US Route 34. All the old green signs had been removed. A single sign had been put up in their place.

          ALL VEHICLES MUST STOP

It had been looted from an old triage center. The FEDRA emblems in the corners had been scraped off and painted over.

With a soft squeal, the Gold Wing came to a halt just as one of the guards held up his hand in the universal sign of ‘stop’. A few feet ahead of the bike, a pair of long, wickedly sharp spike strips were lying across the road, the kind the cops used back in the day to stop cars that didn’t feel like stopping. A final line of defense before their wheels could reach the bridge.

“Welcome to Burlington, bud,” the guard said, his voice filtered by the gas mask he wore, the short M4 carbine in his other hand lowered but ready, his finger resting alongside the trigger guard.

“Howdy,” Joel said, doing a quick, subtle head count.

Four guards on foot, armed with rifles. One teenage boy with a holstered pistol, probably learning the trade of being a guard. Another man with a scoped military sniper rifle up in the tower behind the guard shack, probably a spotter up there with him, and that meant another automatic rifle. Two humvees and that strange, wheeled tank. It was more heat than he’d seen outside of a quarantine zone in years. He didn’t know free armies like this one still existed. He kept his friendly smile fixed in place as a cold feeling began bubbling up in his gut.

He said a quick prayer that Ellie would not make a scene. This wasn’t the sort of thing you could hope to fight your way out of if things went to hell.

“This a toll bridge, I assume?” Joel asked as pleasantly as possible, already suspecting he knew the answer.

“Yep,” the guard said with a curt nod of his head. “The toll is by the head and by the axle. One can of meat and one can of something that’s not meat per head. Three cans of meat and two cans of anything else per axle. I see two people on one axle. That’ll be five cans of meat and four cans of whatever the hell else you got, bud.”

“Are you shitting me?” Ellie asked, her voice not nearly quiet enough from inside the helmet as Joel wanted it to be at that moment. He winced at the words.

“Only two bridges over the Mississippi still standing, lady. The other one is up at the La Crosse MSZ if you wanna try there,” the guard said with the unpleasant half-laugh of someone who knows they’re holding all the cards. “You can pay the toll here or you can drive up there and ask the army men real nice if you can use their bridge.”

“Just two? What about the one down in Helena?” Joel asked. Back in the day, he and the crew had crossed that bridge more than once on their way from their base in Mariana, Arkansas on their way to raid the Memphis QZ until that place was finally played out. That bridge was never free, not even to regular customers like his crew, but the toll hadn’t been this steep either.

“Helena?” the guard replied as though Joel had surprised him with the very mention of the place. “The bridge is still up, I think, but I know for a fact that the town’s been overrun. If you want to chop and burn your way through all the mushrooms down there in Arkansas then be my guest, bud. I know a few guys that visited it by boat a few years ago They said the place is almost as bad as Huey’s bridge down in Baton Rouge. That one’s still standing too, last I heard. But that was a _long_ time ago. Nobody’s come out of Louisiana for at least ten years now, so who knows. It’s been nothing but mushrooms south of Shreveport since Atlanta fell, you know?”

“Yeah. I know about the south. Didn’t know Helena was gone is all,” Joel said with a shrug. “Been a while since I’ve been out this far west.”

“So what’s it gonna be, bud?”

“Ellie, pay the man.”

“Sure thing, Joel.”

She hopped down and began to take the food out of the half-broken, half-repaired cargo box on the side of the Honda. She tried to keep her body between the open lid and the guards. These guys didn’t need to see what else was in there. The broken plastic saddlebag molded onto the motorcycle was lined with a thick leather knapsack they’d found at Fort Overpass. Except for a few cans in their backpacks, it held all the food they had.

She paid the toll, mostly by giving the guard the food she didn’t like. He counted it, can by can, and passed it off to a boy about her age. The boy carried the armload of canned food over to an old Chevy pickup parked near the guard shack, under a big canvas awning, and dropped it in the bed of the truck on top of all the other cans that had been collected recently. From the rattling cacophony that ensued when he dumped the cans in, quite a few people had passed this way recently.

“All right, here’s the deal,” the guard said as Ellie climbed back up on the Honda. “This’ll get you across the bridge and you can visit the market if you want. We got a little of everything there.”

“Cool,” Ellie said, a little excitedly.

“Yeah. Paying the toll buys you a trip to the market too,” the man said. “But it costs more if you want to stay the night. We got a few places where you can rent a bed. You wanna pay extra for a longer stay, bud? Or is the day pass good enough?”

“Day pass,” Joel replied. “We just need some supplies and then we’ll be on our way.”

“Day pass it is,” the guard said, approaching the bike, a white grease pencil in his hand.

He marked the windscreen of the Gold Wing with a small cluster of strange squiggles that neither Joel nor Ellie could read.

“Don’t try to erase or alter this mark until you’re out of Burlington. It’s the pass for your bike. I’m gonna put one on your hands too in a minute. Get caught without one and it won’t go well for you.”

“No problems there,” Joel said.

“Just so you understand,” the guy said, looking at Joel through the lenses of his gas mask, “you gotta be out of town by sundown. We clear on that?”

“We’ll be long gone by then,” Joel agreed.

“Okay then. Put down the kickstand, take off your helmet and sunglasses, and come over here one at a time. I gotta check you two for cordyceps before I can let you through.”

“Got one of them fancy scanners?” Joel asked in a very casual, almost friendly voice.

Behind him, Ellie tensed almost imperceptibly.

“I wish. We got one, but it’s busted,” the guard said with a shrug. “Sensor or the chip went tits up yesterday. Can’t be sure which. We’d pay good trade for a scanner if you got one on you that works.”

“Sorry,” Joel said as he approached with his hands open and out to his side. “Wish I did.”

“Me too. Stand still and don’t blink. And keep your hands away from your weapons. Soon as you two check out, we’ll pull up the spike strip and let you through.”

The guard activated the small LED flashlight in the hand that wasn’t holding the M4. The other guards flanked Joel, guns ready, in case the test results turned out bad. Ellie stood by the bike, helmet in hand, hanging her sunglasses from the collar of her shirt, trying to look like a perfectly normal, non-immune girl.

**. . .**

The ride across the bridge was incredible. Ellie had never seen anything like it. The river far below was dark and deep, almost like the ocean. Small boats dotted the surface, fishing lines cast out to bring in food for the city. A few larger boats plied their way through the rippling waves, most heading upstream to the north, a few following the current south. Ellie looked up at the massive cables supporting the long spans from connection points near the top of giant columns that towered high into the sky. She marveled at the scale of it. This thing was magnificent. And there was another bridge just like it to her left, a colossal, amazing structure put there ages ago for people going the other way on US 34. It was like no bridge she had ever been across in her life and there were _two_ of them! Her grin pushed her cheeks up into the padding of the helmet.

Joel eased them around a small group of people walking across the bridge. The bike glided past an armored humvee. The man at the big machine gun locked eyes with her momentarily as they passed. He nodded. She nodded back.

The guard had checked the back of her neck, behind her ears and inside them too. He’d shined the light in her eyes, under her eyelids, inside her mouth, and up her nose. She’d passed the inspection. No visible signs of CBI. No visible signs of pee on her denim jeans either. A win/win, as Tino would have called it back at the school. For a few seconds, she wondered idly if Tino and Linh had ever managed to get together. She hoped so. Riley had always said those two would make a great couple.

The Gold Wing wasn’t moving very fast and there was a lot of empty bridge to go before they reached the next checkpoint. They were as alone as they were going to get for a while. She leaned close and risked a few words in Joel’s ear.

“How did you know we wouldn’t get scanned?”

“Saw ‘em checking a fella out through the scope when we were back on the hill. Seemed like a basic CBI check. No strip search. And we got damn lucky too, I reckon. Last time I was through a place like this, nobody but the army had those damn scanners. I guess they do now. Good thing their gizmo went south before we showed up.”

“Are they gonna check us again on the other side of this bridge?”

“Shouldn’t. We’ve already been cleared. Just don’t draw any attention to yourself and they’ll leave you alone.”

“Okay.” She did not sound entirely convinced. “Man, I hope you’re right.”

“Me too. But it ain’t like we got any other choice, Ellie. That river down there is a little too big for a pallet ride.”

She giggled to hide her nervousness.

**. . .**

The last few concrete and asphalt slabs of the bridge were rolling under their slowing wheels. Another skeletal steel frame for highway signs was looming overhead. The magnetic tile letters stuck to the only sign over the end of the bridge read simply:

              BURLINGTON AHEAD  
              MARKET EXIT RIGHT  
           DO NOT TURN AROUND

Another armored truck guarded the end of the bridge. Another cluster of old, rusted vehicles placed in a zig zag pattern to be threaded through. More concertina razor wire. On the far side of the obstacles, more armed men were waiting. One of them spoke into a walkie-talkie as Joel approached.

Beyond those men, fifty feet of blacktop, then even more armed men and an honest to god tank sitting at the junction of the west and eastbound lanes.

These guys have a goddamn tank, Joel thought to himself. Jesus Christ. No wonder Burlington is still standing.

The checkpoint guard with the radio motioned for them to stop as they reached him. He was wearing the same style of orange safety vest over his body armor as the guards at the other end. It was what passed for a uniform for the enforcers of this city’s laws. His old olive drab field jacket was missing both the sleeves. His pants were urban camouflage fatigues, patched and stitched from years of regular use. Short dreadlocks poked out from beneath his old desert camo patterned army helmet. His black hair was turning gray.

“Red bike with two across now,” Ellie heard him say into the walkie-talkie.

“Red bike with two. Okay,” came the reply. It was the voice of the man that had checked them for cordyceps minutes before. “Got a blue Toyota waiting. Two in the cab, three in the back. Truck checked. People scanned and cleared. Ready on your end?”

“Blue Toyota with five. Stand by. Six on foot still on the bridge. They’ve been on there a while, Josh.”

“Walked here from Detroit, or so they said,” the man on the radio responded. “They looked pretty ragged to me, Damon.”

“Slow movers. Gotcha. Moving the red bike on now. Send the next one.”

“Blue Toyota with five on the move,” the voice on the radio responded.

“Waiting on a Blue Toyota,” the guard said into the walkie-talkie as he took one step towards the bike. His next words were for Joel. “See that tank?”

“Hard to miss it,” Joel said.

“Drive over there and check in with those guys, okay? And don’t get lost along the way.”

“No problem,” Joel said and worked the shifter with the toe of his left boot.

The Honda rolled slowly forward. One of the orange-vested men by the tank waved them over. Joel pulled to a stop as he reached the man.

“Hello, daypassers. Welcome to Burlington,” the guard said, reading the weird scribble on the windscreen, his accent odd. It reminded Joel of Alexa, the French-Canadian woman who had been a part of his crew years before. “You going to market today, guys? Or do I need to hustle you through and get you back on the road before a line forms behind you? Can’t have too many people hanging around in the transfer zone, you know.”

”Going shoppin’,” Joel said. “Need some supplies. Got a little stuff to trade too.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” the man said. He wore body armor like all the guards. His clothes were a mixture of army-issued black cargo pants with a lightweight, zip-up jacket in brown woodland camouflage like a deer hunter might wear. He wore an old blue baseball cab with a black bill. A patch on the front bore the logo of the Edmonton Oilers. His gasmask was in a satchel on his belt, like all the guards who were safe within the perimeter of the outer barricades. A submachine gun was in his hand, but he smiled at the pair, his teeth white and healthy beneath his big, bushy moustache. He was almost friendly. It was easy to be polite to strangers when you have a tank in your corner. “Follow that off-ramp over there. It’ll take you down to the market. Just follow the rules and there won’t be any problems with me or any of the other enforcers, okay?”

“Okay,” said Joel.

“Okay,” Ellie echoed, returning the man’s smile.

“They’re alright,” the man shouted to the guards near the checkpoint built around the top of the off-ramp.

The guards there nodded and waved Joel over.

The moustache man shouted to the guards by the end of the bridge. “Ready for the next one, Damon!”

“Still comin’ across! Blue Toyota! I’ll send him over to you when he arrives!”

Joel dropped the bike into first gear and made the turn towards the checkpoint. He eased past a Dodge pickup truck converted into some sort of light armored vehicle and steered them past the guards there and towards the market below.

“Why do they only let people through a few at a time like that?” Ellie asked.

“Keeps any troublemakers whittled down to small groups. Hard to be brave when you’re alone and surrounded by that many guns and your buddies are still stuck behind you at all the different checkpoints. Even a big group of bad guys tryin’ to roll in here can’t gang up on the guards this way. They’d just get shot if they tried.”

“Smart.”

“Yep.”

If more places had been this smart, Joel mused darkly, there’d still be more places.

They rode along slowly, coasting down the asphalt, weaving around people here and there that were walking up and down the ramp. He and Ellie could see the stalls and buildings of the marketplace ahead. It was a series of big open lots, easily the size of a football field, filled with brick buildings, mobile homes, wooden stalls, and converted shipping containers. Hell, towards the grassy end, in what used to be a park probably, he could see a few big canvas cabin tents with gardens behind them. The entire market was fenced in, separate from the rest of the town. There was an enclosed parking lot filled with trucks and a few motorcycles. Next to it, another parking lot with a few vehicles for sale. Guards were everywhere, watching the people who were milling about inside. The shoppers were in no hurry down there, moving casually, no signs of panic or distress. This place was on the level, Joel decided. Ellie was practically bouncing around in her seat behind him.

“Oh man! This is gonna be so fucking cool, Joel.”

As they approached the final checkpoint before reaching the marketplace, another sign told them that all vehicles must stop. They did so. The armed men on either side of checkpoint would have corrected them had they made the wrong choice regarding the sign.

From the doorway of a place that was more bunker than building, an enforcer ambled over to them, military shotgun in hand. Other enforcers looked on, eyes alert and scanning for trouble. It only took one mistake for things to go wrong in this world. Snipers were on the roof of the bunker. A Bradley IFV sat nearby, manned and ready, discouraging trouble before it started. The barrel of its 20mm autocannon gleamed in the sunlight, dark and deadly.

“Howdy,” Joel said to the guard as he was inspecting the white markings on the windscreen of the Honda.

“Hey,” the man said curtly. His automatic shotgun was ready in his hands, a large drum of 12 gauge ammunition fitted to it. His voice was steady and assured; he had delivered this speech more times than he wanted to think about. “Here’s the deal, man. Weapons get checked here. Rifles, pistols, knives, clubs, everything. We store them in one of the lockers inside this building and you get the key. Pick them up on your way out. Or you can sell any extra you have to that guy in the shop right there across the street or to the lady in the shop next to it. Ammo you’re allowed to keep on you. You’ll need it for trading. You can park your bike in the big, gated parking lot over there with the watch towers and you’ll get a plastic tag with a number for it. Only way in or out of that lot is that gate you see right there. Your bike will be safe in there. Nobody’ll fuck with it. But don’t lose your ticket or you don’t get your bike back. It’ll wind up in the ‘for sale’ lot next to it. Simple as that. Any questions?”

Joel looked around a moment before responding. “Actually, I need to get it tuned up. Is there a mechanic around here?”

“Yeah. Over there,” the enforcer said, indicating with his chin towards a line of garages on this side of the entrance to the main marketplace, between the gun dealers and the gated parking lots across from the bottom off the off-ramp. “Mechanic’s Row. Three different shops, and they all do good work. They’ll getcha fixed up, man. But it’s either the shops or the parking lot for your bike, okay? No vehicles past this point. Anything else you wanna ask?”

Joel responded easily, familiar with this sort of place, for which a bewildered Ellie was very thankful.

“Before we go shoppin’, do we exchange somethin’ for local cash here? Or is it barter?”

“Barter,” the guard responded. “Cash is only for locals.”

Joel nodded. “Thanks. I’m good then.”

“I’ll take those weapons now,” the enforcer said “Bring ‘em and follow me.”

Joel climbed down and began to gather the slung rifles from the back of the motorcycle.

“Ellie, give me your guns and your knife.”

“ _Joel_ ,” she whispered, her eyes pleading with him from inside her helmet.

“Give ‘em here, Ellie. And stay with the bike. I’ll be back quick as I can.”

**. . .**

‘Lonesome Roads’, the sign over the garage read. There were three garages up and running in the outer marketplace of Burlington, but Joel picked this one. ‘Motorcycles Our Speciality’ the slightly misspelled sign next to the roll up door had made the decision easy for him. Ken, the man who came out to speak to Joel as he stopped the bike near the big door had a shaved head and many tattoos. He was Joel’s age if not older. Grease and oil were smeared across his skin. Ellie stood nearby, helmet in hand, watching them talk, listening to the music coming from the boom box resting on a toolbox inside the shop, the cord of the stereo plugged into the wall. Burlington had electricity.

“Sure,” Ken said. “We can do that. Simple fix. Ah got a refurbished batt’ry that’s perfect fer yer bike. Or Ah can pull out the one ya got, drain it, flush it, put some new lead plates in, and fill ‘er up with fresh acid.”

He spoke with an even more pronounced version of the same accent she’d heard used by the bandits at Fort Overpass. She wondered if he was a hillbilly, the kind Joel had told her about, the people he had lots of funny jokes about. She tried not to smile as she listened to Ken speak. It was a weird accent, but kind of cute too. She liked Joel’s Texas drawl better. She wished she spoke with a cool accent, but she just talked like a normal person.

”Which is cheaper?” Joel drawled.

“First option,” Ken twanged in reply. “Refurbishin’ work’s already been done on muh batt’ry, so Ah don’t have ta charge ya fer that part of it. But if ya let me keep yer old one ta clean up and sell later, Ah’ll knock a little off the price… say... ten shells? How ‘bout it, buddy?”

“So…” Joel said, doing bitter math in his head. “Still over a hundred shotgun shells for the whole job.”

“Yep. Hundred and twenty, total. It sounds like a lot, Ah know, but that front tire’s purt near bald from ya’ll havin’ ta overcorrect them misaligned forks mile after mile. They gotta be straightened first or any fresh tire Ah put on that bike’s gonna lose its tread the same damn way. And that ol’ batt’ry of yers is jest about dead. Five more cranks, tops, and then ya got yerself a big ol’ red doorstop on yer hands, buddy.”

“Shit,” Ellie said, though neither man seemed to notice. Joel hadn’t told her how close they had been to losing the bike.

“Okay, Ken. Here’s my offer,” Joel said, ready to haggle. “I got a Ruger Mini-14 with a good sling, a folding stock, and a magazine that’s full. Good gun and in good shape. How ‘bout I trade that for the tire, the fork job, the battery, a full tank of gas, and a quick tune up?”

“It’s in the arm’ry?”

”Yep,” Joel could tell from the subtle change in the tone of Ken’s voice that he had him on the hook now. All he had to do was set it good and solid. “Original model. Thick barrel. None of that taperin’ shit the later ones have. Genuine walnut stock too. Not polymer or laminate. Made to last, Ken.”

“Hmm… Let’s go take a look at it and Ah’ll give ya muh answer,” Ken said with a smile.

Joel smiled back.

“Ellie, you watch the bike. Ken and me’ll be right back.”

**. . .**

“Come back in two hours and she’ll be ready ta roll, buddy.”

“Two?”

“Look around,” Ken said with a well-practiced ‘just business’ shrug. “Got a pair of trucks in front of ya, man. One pulled up while we was off lookin’ at the Ruger. And muh bike guy jest started on a Harley with forks fucked up even worse than yers.”

“But we were here before that motorcycle _and_ that stupid truck,” Ellie said, not seeing the cautioning look Joel threw her way. “I was standing right here when they pulled in”

“No cuttin’ ahead in line, girl. And ya’ll didn’t git in line ‘til Ah got paid,” Ken replied in his twangy voice, cool and confident, knowing how things worked in this city. “Now it’ll be an hour before Ah git ta yer bike. Then an hour ta git ‘er fixed and give ‘er a basic once over. That’s two hours. Feel free ta check muh math, girl.”

“Pfft,” Ellie said, crossing her arms, defiant in defeat. “You’re dealing with my partner, not me, ‘buddy’. He can do the math.”

“Alright, alright. Settle down, Ellie,” Joel grumbled. “It’s just two hours. It won’t kill us to wait.”

“What? Here?” Ellie asked, looking at the greasy, oily floor and not seeing any chairs.

“Not here ya ain’t. Go sit outside and watch the world go by or somethin’,” Ken said, noting how Ellie rolled her eyes disdainfully of him. He decided to needle her a little. “Or you and yer ‘partner’ can go git a bed at the Love Shack. They got hourly rates and privacy curtains between most of the beds.”

Joel glowered. Ellie spluttered and then blushed.

Joel’s voice was cold and flat. “We ain’t like that.”

“Forget Ah said it then, man. Go git a burger or somethin’,” Ken said with a semi-apologetic shrug, backpedaling verbally, but only a little. There was work to do and he needed to get to it. Time was still money in Burlington, even if it wasn’t like that in other towns anymore. “Look, Ah don’t care what ya’ll do in the meantime, but ya’ll don’t git ta cut in line. And this ain’t a lounge. It’s a garage. So ya’ll don’t git ta hang out in here. Come back in two hours.”

Pouting and pissed, Ellie muttered under her breath. “How do we know you won’t just take all our shit while we’re gone?”

“Ellie!” Joel’s voice was too loud, too close to anger. Anger at her. His glare was withering. She visibly recoiled from it.

Ken’s response was low, with a threatening edge to it. His thick backwoods accent was almost entirely gone now. “What the fuck did you just say to me, girl?”

“Ellie…” Joel spoke in a way that chilled her blood. “Shut. Up.”

A few nearby mechanics and their assistants stopped what they were doing and watched the unfolding confrontation very carefully. Wrenches and other heavy tools began to appear in their hands.

Ken could see how fast this was about to fall apart. He talked fast to defuse it, his voice quiet but uncompromising. “You better keep her in line, man. Some shop bosses would call the enforcers over shit like that. But we don’t want that kind of trouble. Do we, Joel?”

“No, we don’t. She didn’t mean anything by it. She’s never been outside of the QZ until just a few weeks ago. She’s still learnin’ how it is out here.” Joel’s voice was low, like Ken’s. He knew how close to violence they were. “Ellie, you apologize to this man right now. Go on.”

Ellie could sense the danger too. She wasn’t sure how she stumbled into this minefield. She had only stated the stupid, obvious truth, right? But she wanted to keep her skull intact, just everyone else in the room. She said the words, even if she didn’t mean them.

“I’m sorry.”

Ken signaled discretely to the other mechanics and they returned to their work.

The bald man nodded, first to her and then to Joel. “Alright. Cool. But watch it. Ah run a clean shop. Ah don’t need this kind of hassle from ya’ll, understand? And Ah don’t need the heat of the enforcers in here neither. Work stops durin’ an investigation. That’s lost revenue. Git me?”

“Yeah. Okay.” She looked out the open door, frowning. It felt like she was being asked to apologize twice and she resented it.

Ken sucked at his teeth and pressed on, burying his accent deep. The good ol’ boy angle wasn’t needed here. The kid had to understand how things worked outside the QZs.

“Watch what ya say around this town, kid. Havin’ a shop out in the market is a real deluxe deal. I do a hundred times the business in here that I did on the other side of the fence in town. I _do not_ want to lose this spot. Neither do the guys who work for me. _Nobody_ wants to risk somethin’ that’ll get a shop a bad rep.”

“Okay, _okay_. I get it.” Her red but cold face told him she was trying to let it wash over her and not sink in. She didn’t want to be lectured by a stranger.

Ken knew better. Ken had kids in his life. Two sons. Good men both. A younger daughter not much older than Ellie. And from his oldest son and his Yankee wife, a granddaughter who wasn’t much younger than this girl. She was a daypasser. What did she know about anything? Nothing, that’s what. She needed to learn before she got her teeth kicked in by a shop keep or a bullet in her pretty little head courtesy of one of the men in the orange vests. He took a deep breath and the granddad in him went to work.

“Ellie, right? Look, Ellie, double dealin’ and stealin’ and shit is against the code. That shit’s hard time, kid. Hard _labor_ , understand? Sometimes for the shop keep and the person doin’ the accusing. Especially if the enforcers don’t feel like workin’ an investigation too hard. The bosses in this city don’t fuck around so that’s why the laws are simple and the enforcers are every fuckin’ where. Don’t neither one of us wanna spend a year on the bridge repair gang with a chain around our necks, breakin’ big rocks into little ones with a sledge hammer and mixin’ concrete and blacktop in the boilin’ hot sun all because of somethin’ somebody said. Get me?”

Ellie could sense that that this bald, greasy guy was trying to teach her something. But he didn’t need to keep repeating it. She wasn’t dumb. But Joel was letting him talk. That meant he wanted her to hear it, she supposed. Her words were somewhat sincere this time.

“Yeah. Sure. I said I’m sorry, all right? Can we let it go, Ken?”

“Ah’m jest tryin’ ta help ya out, kid,” he said, stating the obvious, his accent easing back into place. He shrugged. He had done all he was going to do. It was more than most would do for a daypasser in this city, even if the daypasser was a kid.

“I’ll watch her,” Joel said, one hand settling down on her small shoulder.

Ellie looked away, flustered and embarrassed. She wanted to be cool. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t know the stupid rules here. She didn’t need Joel yelling at her, that was for sure. She didn’t need a lecture. She didn’t need babysitting either, but she had only the slightest inkling of the danger poorly chosen words could stir up in a place like this where human life was a secondary concern next to commerce.

It was hard being a rebellious teenager in a world with few rules and even less safety. Not much nest to stretch your wings in before being kicked out into the world. Almost no nest at all if you were an orphan to begin with.

“Seriously buddy,” Ken said to Joel, “it don’t take much ta git on the wrong end of a billyclub in Burlington. Jest lettin’ ya’ll know that.”

“I appreciate it, Ken,” Joel said with a nod of thanks. “She knows better now. We’ll be alright, I reckon. Come on, Ellie. Give me a hand unloadin’ our stuff from the bike.”

“Sure thing, Joel.” Sullen. But only a little.

It only took a few minutes. When your life fit into a pair of backpacks and two plastic cargo boxes, there wasn’t a lot of stuff to unpack. They emptied out the Honda’s saddlebags and stacked everything they weren’t taking into market on the shelves of one of the multi-colored, repurposed high school lockers in the corner of the garage. Ken locked it up and gave Joel the key.

“Don’t lose it, buddy,” Ken said.

Joel passed the little brass key to Ellie.

“Don’t lose it, girl,” Joel said.

She smiled, stuffed the small key as deep into the front pocket of her jeans as it would go. She was glad she was wearing the pair that didn’t have holes in both the pockets. She was glad to have his trust.

She grinned and elbowed him adoringly. “You messed up, Joel. Now you can’t leave the city without me.”

He chuckled. They followed Ken to the door of the shop.

“Back in two hours,” Ken reminded them, continuing in an almost friendly tone, “If’n ya’ll keep me waitin’ too long, Ah’ll start chargin’ ya’ll rent. Yer bike is safe in muh shop, but that service don’t come fer free once she’s fixed. We ain’t valet parkin’, buddy. Get me?”

“Two hours,” Joel repeated dryly, rapidly growing tired of this shop. He looked at the clock on the wall by a twenty-year-old calendar full of naked women and exotic cars. October, apparently. And almost noon. He gently took Ellie’s upper arm in his hand and led her out onto the bustling, sunlit streets of the outer market. “See you soon, Ken.”

Ellie’s voice bounced around the confines of the shop as she departed.

“What’s valet parking?”

**. . .**

The gun stores were in the outer market, and a customer had two choices when it came to shopping: ‘Ammo By The Pound’ or ‘Bullets 4 Bullets’. Joel had let Ellie pick and she had chosen the one with the chubby, brassy-haired woman behind the counter. Redheads had to stick by each other in this world, she’d told him.

Joel traded the box of 5.56mm ammo that he’d been saving for a rifle that he now no longer owned and got a box of .45 ACP for his Colt and half a box of .38 Special ammo. The latter wasn’t his first choice for the Taurus; it was a weaker round than the .357 Magnum he preferred, but he could get .38 ammo cheap here and it would chamber and fire in his revolver. He threw in a few 00 buck from his ample supply of 12 gauge shells to get the woman to fill the box of .38 to the top.

Ellie traded half a box of her .32 ACP for some 28 gauge shells for her shotgun. Pistol ammo she had in abundance, but ammunition for the small shotgun was hard to come by. She was happy to get it however she could. Her excitement when she learned that the woman had some in stock was so great that she’d probably enthused herself right into being overcharged. But she didn’t care. So what if she was an easy mark? She was happy. Her joy brought a smile to Joel’s face.

“Here you go, sweetheart,” the lady behind the counter said while two armed security guards flanked her at either end of the long window. “One dozen shells. 28 gauge.”

The rounds were a mix of deep red, dark green, and bright blue plastic casings. Each color signified a different kind of pellet load. Ellie didn’t care. Shells were shells and her beloved shotgun was hungry.

She scooped them up eagerly. “Sweet! Thank you!”

“Some of them are new. Some are reloads. But we do good work. Our ammo is reliable,” the woman said, happy to see a satisfied customer. Happier still because she’d charged the cute young teenager just a little more than she normally would for the exchange because the girl seemed ready to pay almost any price. Now everyone was very happy.

“Cool,” Ellie said. The shells disappeared into her pack. She shouldered it and practically bounced over to Joel. “Ready to go, boss?”

“Ready.” He smiled at the girl, so full of life and joy, so young. “You hungry?”

“Am I ever _not_ hungry?” she grinned.

**. . .**

They crossed the plaza of the outer market and handful of shoppers milling about; making their way to the checkpoint that permitted entrance to the more crowded inner market.

“That was my mom’s knife, by the way, Joel.”

“You’ll get it back.”

“I better.”

“Here we go,” Joel said, as they neared the checkpoint and the armed men protecting it. “You let me do the talkin’. Okay, Ellie?”

“Won’t say a word, boss,” she promised.

“That’s far enough,” the guard said, a short, pump-action shotgun slung across his orange-vested chest. “Let me see your hands. Gotta check the markings on them.”

The man and the teenager held their left hands out, exposing the strange symbols the guard back at the start of the bridge had drawn on their skin with a black, permanent marker.

“All right. Looks good.”

“Can we go on through then?” Joel asked.

“You better not be here to window shop,” the guard said.

“What’s that?” Ellie asked, her promise of two minutes ago already forgotten.

Joel sighed and prayed for strength.

The surly man turned his attention on her. “Means you look but you don’t buy nothing. It’s not a theme park. The market is for trading. You come in here, you’d better be ready to trade.”

“We are,” Joel assured him. “We’re in need of a fair amount of supplies, in fact.”

“Good. Here’s the rules: Don’t pick a fight. Fighters get a year of hard labor. Don’t matter who started it. Everyone caught throwing a punch gets the same punishment.“

“No problem.” Joel said.

“All trades are final and all trades are fair. You get caught trying to pass off dud ammo or fake rounds, that gets you a year and a half of hard labor. Same goes for canned food, if you want to trade that instead of ammo. Can has to be labeled right, no taped-on labels, and no rusty or dented stuff. Good food for good trade, understand?”

“I understand,” Joel nodded.

“And no shoplifting. Thieves get two years hard labor. More if you steal something really valuable. You get a haircut, hire a whore, whatever, you pay for it up front. No dine and dash bullshit.”

“Pay up front. I gotcha.” Joel did his best to make it seem as though he were soaking up this man’s wisdom. The Texan had spent more than his fair share of time in places like this, especially in the early days on the road, when places like this were more common, when the world still had plenty of stuff left to sell, back before the scavengers picked the ruins clean, back before the hunters and the infected gobbled up the shanty towns, one by one.

“And I hope for your sake you turned all your weapons in before you came down here. You’d better not be hiding something. If we see a weapon in your hand, that hand is getting cut off. No joke. Understand?”

“Understood.” Joel’s voice was calm and relaxed.

“No pissing or shitting in the alleys either. There are porta-crappers at each end of the market. Use them.”

Ellie shifted from foot to foot. She was anxious to get inside. She didn’t want to listen to any more rules today.

“And if you’re Fireflies, you keep your rabble rousing pie holes shut while you’re here. We don’t want none of your ‘stand together’ bullshit. You can go ‘rise up’ somewhere else, got it? We catch you painting so much as one firefly logo on our walls and we will bring you back here and throw you off this fucking bridge. No hard labor for that crime. Just _death_. Got it?”

“Fuck the fireflies” Joel said.

“Good man” the guard replied.

Ellie wondered at this. Didn’t the people here support the fireflies? Everyone hated FEDRA, right? The Fireflies were going to put things back to the way they used to be. That’s what Marlene had said. It’s what Riley had believed. Ellie had never been a big fan, but she wasn’t much of a joiner. And she wasn’t inclined to have much faith in their cause, not after the way a bunch of innocent people had been accidentally killed by the bombs the Fireflies set off in Boston over the years. But at least they were trying to make the world a better place, right?

“This is the only way in or out of the market,” the guard said, wrapping up his speech, pulling Ellie back to the here and now with his words. “I’ll check that mark again when you come out. You better not overstay, daypassers.”

Joel nodded. “We’ll be long gone before sundown.”

“Good,” he said, stepping aside. “Go on through.”

Ellie and Joel passed through the open metal gates and into the cordoned-off street that led to the inner market at the far end. Behind them, they heard the voice of the surly guard speaking to the next group of shoppers approaching his checkpoint.

“That’s far enough. Let me see your hands. Gotta check the markings on them.”

**. . .**

The entranceway into the inner market was narrow, a side street really, converted into an ad hoc thoroughfare. Tall concrete slabs had been erected along the length of the street to make it even more confining. At best, no more than four people could walk shoulder to shoulder through this passage. It was crowded along the way. People making their way in and out. Metal frame fences wrapped in loops of barbed wire taking up half the damn street in places, obstacles they had to thread their way through make it even more of a pain in the ass to negotiate this connection from the outer market to the inner one. Weaving left for a while, then right for a while, back and forth, crowded in by people and concrete, a maze filled with razor sharp points and swinging elbows.

“Why is this street all junked up like this?” Ellie groused, eyes always scanning, careful not to let anyone get their hands in her backpack or her pockets.

“Why do you think?” Joel asked, testing her, his eyes watching for pickpockets too.

“Umm…” She thought fast. She was clever. It came to her quickly. “To keep infected out.”

“Yeah. Or to keep ‘em in. Infected aren’t smart enough to handle a maze like this. They tend to run right into barbed wire, ‘specially if it’s a frame fence.”

Ellie remembered the clickers back at the Big Darby and how they had run straight into the big chain link fence as though they didn’t know it was there.

“Keep them in? If an outbreak happens in the market, you mean?” she asked.

“Yeah. Can’t be too careful when you get folks from all over mixin’ together like this.”

“Fuck, Joel. I wish I had my gun.”

“Me too.”

**. . .**

The inner market was large, fenced in on all sides and packed with small, efficient shops and more homemade stalls than she had ever seen before. Easily a hundred people or more were milling around, shopping, talking, some were even joking. She’d never seen anything remotely like this. She was in awe. It was the closest to the crowded old world that she’d ever been.

“Holy shit, Joel. This is… _crazy_.”

“Yeah. Stay close. Don’t go wanderin’ off.”

It reminded Ellie of the smaller, more dingy slums in Boston that she and Riley had watched from the safety of the rooftops some nights during their secret excursions from the dorms. From up there, the people had looked so exciting and cool. From down here, they were more scary than exciting. Too many people. You needed eyes in the back of your head. She felt small and walked closer to Joel than she normally dared. She wanted a gun in her hand, but Joel knew better. If a gunfight broke out in a place like this, it would be a slaughterhouse for all involved. Mutually assured destruction, Joel would have called it, using a term from his time, when he was a very little boy, back in the days when the world fought a war without fighting by holding fast to simple self-preservation in the face of barely checked, annihilating, all-consuming violence. Somehow it had all made sense to most people at the time but he wouldn’t even know how to explain something like that to her now.

Walls had been put up to divide the city of Burlington from the market that was its beating heart, to separate the people that lived here from those that were just passing through. Barriers made of concrete, steel, and barbed wire. Slabs and fences, all mixed together to fence it all in and turn this area into its own little world. Left unchecked, the market would surely grow malignant and consume the entire city. It had to be kept small enough to be policed effectively but large enough to be profitable. It was a balancing act that Joel could only barely guess at.

Guards were everywhere, easily spotted in their orange safety vests, up on platforms and walkways, near spotlights that would come to life later, when the sun went down. Neither Ellie nor Joel knew it, but the old university in town had a pair of small hydroelectric generators originally put in to please green-friendly donors. They provided just enough power to supply the very carefully distributed needs of this town.

Every shop had a clock easily visible from the doorway. Time was money here. Joel remembered when the whole world was like that. Ellie only knew time as something that kept you tied to a schedule the instructors dictated. She hated clocks on general principle.

“Smell that?” Joel asked, walking tall and confident, forming a protective bubble of swaggering invincibility around himself through sheer force of will.

Ellie mimicked him as she often did. Her slim, willowy form upright and proud, matching his stride. Shorter legs, smaller feet, moving fast, keeping up. Falling behind wasn’t an option. You couldn’t look weak here.

She sniffed the air. A thousand scents swirled in her nostrils, good and bad, spicy and rotten, sumptuous and sickly.

“Smoked meat!” she grinned then checked herself, forcing her mouth back into an indifferent line of cool badassedness, just like Joel’s.

“Yep. I think the greasy spoons are over there, around that corner, just past those vegetable stands.”

“Greasy spoons?” she smiled, slipping into her fake Texas drawl to tease him. “Is that there Texas talk for ‘lunch’, pardner?”

“Yep. Lunch first. Then we’ll look around and see if we can find anything we need.”

“How much does food cost here, do you think?” She thought about the pistol bullets in her backpack. How fast would she spend them? She didn’t want to spend too many of them. There was sure to be more violence between here and Wyoming.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head none about it, little buckaroo. I reckon I’m buyin’ lunch today,” Joel said, a faint smile on his lips.

Ellie grinned. She tried to reel it in, tone it down, be cool, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Aww. Thanks, Joel. You’re too good to me.”

“Yes, I am,” he chuckled.

She thought about socking him in the arm, but didn’t want to do hard time for starting a fight. Nobody around here seemed to have a sense of humor.

**. . .**

“That’ll be four pistol bullets or two rifle bullets. No small, rimfire stuff,” the lady at the counter said in an accent that sounded like Chicago to Joel. “Centerfire, if you please.”

“You take shotgun shells?” Joel asked.

“Sure. They count the same as rifle bullets in here,” she nodded.

Joel dropped a pair of purple shells into her hand. Target load, good for light game like squirrels or rabbit, but not much use against clickers. The woman frowned but took them anyway. She pushed the two chipped and well-worn ceramic plates of food across the counter to them. Two red plastic cups filled with cold, local beer quickly followed. Ellie grabbed her plate and cup and followed Joel to a table near the back of the diner.

The sign out front of this place was simple, bearing the words ‘Meat & Beer Served Here’. Nothing fancy was needed. The smell of the fresh meat sizzling on the grill was the best advertisement the diner could possibly have. It was a crowded place, but calm. A couple of hired security guards were hanging around, clubs tucked in their belts, keeping the peace. Ellie’s eager eyes took in as many of the details as discretely as she could.

“Don’t get caught starin’, Ellie,” Joel murmured, his mouth watering as he lifted his burger to his mouth. Fresh slices of locally baked bread. Mustard, mayo, hot sauce, lettuce, onion, and tomato over some kind ground meat. Not beef, most likely. He didn’t care. He was sick of his own cooking, sick of eating out of cans, sick of skinning and gutting squirrels riddled with shotgun pellets that needed to be picked out very carefully or else you’d crack a tooth. This was hot and savory and delicious and worth the price.

“Sorry,” she said. “This place is just so amazing, you know? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

It was the truth. Her life had been filled with orphanages and dormitories. She only had a few chances at foster homes, and they never worked out for very long. It was just too hard to feed a kid when rations got tight and too easy to give that kid back to the orphanage, no questions asked. Ellie knew nothing of crowds like this. She’d never eaten in a place where you got to choose what was served to you. The meal on the table in front of her came with her choice of sides: mashed potatoes, corn, fried squash, coleslaw, pickled beets, green beans, collard greens, fried okra, potato salad, or deviled eggs. Now hurry up and pick one. She didn’t even know what half of those things were. The unexpected richness of the choice, so out of the blue like that, had practically locked her brain up. She wasn’t used to adults asking for her input on anything. Joel had almost been forced to choose for her when she had finally managed to squeak out ‘potato salad’.

She ate a big forkful of the tasty, chunky stuff and risked a furtive look around again.

In the corner, the jukebox was playing a song she didn’t recognize. She hadn’t recognized any of the songs it had played since they had walked in here. She didn’t care. Any music was good at this point. She thought about paying the lady at the counter a pistol bullet so she could pick out three songs.

“ _Cause now I know that love ain’t easy to find_ ,” the man sang while electric guitars and booming drums rocked underneath his voice. “ _I let you go. Now I’m changing my mind_.”

The small diner was filled with people doing more eating that talking. The walls resounded with the constant clatter and clang of the kitchen, the clink of forks tapping plates, the gentle stir of many shoes shuffling across a sawdust covered floor, the soft scrape of chairs being pulled out or pushed in under old tables, the whir of oscillating old fans up in the corners trying to keep the heat and stink of so many bodies at a manageable level, and always with a low bed of murmuring underneath the din, a dozen quiet conversations, orders placed, meals ready for pickup at the little window by the counter. Jokes, shared miseries, stories swapped, connections made or renewed, soft threats, words like baited hooks hoping to draw in the right person, the one who’s got what you need, what you’re jonesing for, what you came here looking for in the first place. Bad news, good news, news of the world, invitations to meet someplace else, someplace a little more quiet, someplace better for the business that two people can get up to when they’re alone. The sounds of humanity gathered together in numbers. Ellie drank it in and it filled her up even more than the thick potato salad she was shoveling into her mouth. She thought about the extra dollop of sweet red ketchup she’d squeezed onto the burger waiting for her on the plate, the thin slice of onion scooted off to the side by small hands that didn’t care for tart onions fucking up a tasty burger, a white disk waiting patiently for Joel to snatch it from her plate and pop it in his mouth any minute now. The smell of the meat and the bread and the dressings wafted up to her. She almost groaned. Man, she was so fucking sick of fried squirrel.

“Yah cahm tuh mennuh paffufs lah thif?” she asked, her mouth full of delicious, ketchupy burger, her words mushier than the food she was chewing. But this wasn’t the first conversation he’d had with this girl over dinner. He spoke this language of hers now.

You come to many places like this, he translated it in his head.

“Yeah, a few. Especially before the outbreak. Me and Tommy used to eat in diners and truck stops all the damn time when we were out on a job. When we weren’t eatin’ at McDonalds or somethin’ faster if we were in a hurry, I mean.”

The one good eye of the grizzled, dangerous old man at the table next to them became soft and wistful for the briefest of moments at the mention of that long gone franchise with the bright yellow ‘M’. But no one noticed. Everyone here knew to keep their eyes on their food.

Joel snatched the onion slice from her plate and chewed it while she grinned at him, meat and lettuce in her teeth. He cocked one eyebrow and swallowed the bits of onion, smug and unrepentant about what he’d done. She giggled, deep and throaty, her mouth still full.

She spoke while chewing again and his mind translated her words into the language of people who didn’t speak with a damn mouth full of food. He made a mental note to teach her that language one day. This girl needed some civilizing, no doubt about that.

“Did you usually order hamburgers? Or did you get something else?”

“Hamburgers mostly, I suppose. But sometimes we’d get a pizza or ribs or some fried chicken. Or tacos. Tommy _loves_ Mexican food.”

“I like tacos,” Ellie smiled, sipping from her beer. “They made tortillas out of mushed up corn sometimes and the chow hall would serve us tacos.”

“Beef or chicken?” Joel asked, spooning some coleslaw into his mouth.

“Chicken,” she answered. “Most of the time. Sometimes pork. Beef was usually just for the instructors. But I had this friend who worked in the kitchen. Sometimes she’d save the leftovers and make little beef burritos and we’d sneak in and eat them before lights out.”

“Must be nice havin’ connections like that,” Joel chuckled

“It was. She was pretty cool. Her name was Cheryl Lynn Jackson, but everybody called her Cherry because she had bright red hair.”

A new song was playing on the jukebox. The same man as before was singing this one too. “ _Don’t let this good love slip away now that we know that it’s true_.”

She liked this song. It had a lot of guitar. She liked this food too. The burger could have been rat for all she cared. It was delicious. She wolfed more of it down and chased it with cold beer from her plastic cup. Her eyes never left Joel, twinkling at him over the edge of her cup. She wanted to talk more, no doubt about it, she just didn’t want to drown from the beer in her cup by trying to talk and drink at the same time – damn her limited biology! There were so many questions on her face, so much adoration in her eyes.

“ _Don’t you know the kind of man I am?_ ” the song continued. “ _I said I’d never fall in love again_.”

Joel had never been much for small talk, but Ellie was so eager to share something about herself that he decided to open the door to more conversation.

“Oh yeah? A redhead like you, huh?”

She smiled and wiped the beer and grease from lips with her sleeve. A forkful of potato salad was in her hand, ready to get shoveled into her mouth just as soon as she stopped talking. Couldn’t talk and swallow food either. Evolution had dropped the ball on that one for sure.

“Sorta. It wasn’t dark red, like mine, but red like… I don’t know… Willie Nelson,” she said, suddenly remembering Winston and his funny collection of big vinyl record albums that she and Riley had teased him about some nights as he maintained his lonely vigil in that old, abandoned mall. The old guy had been a saint for putting up with two sweetly obnoxious teenage girls. Ellie was only now starting to realize that. The smile on her face flickered at the memory of Winston and the life she had left behind in Boston.

Joel stopped chewing, blindsided by this sudden revelation. He chuckled in a delighted way that made Ellie warm all over.

He spoke around the wad of coleslaw in his mouth, talking to her in her own tongue. It made her giggle, ripples of mirth vibrating the potato salad now packing her mouth.

“Yah nahh abahh Wihheh Nehffn?”

You know about Willie Nelson? The words were quite plain to her. She grinned, thrilled that he was talking to her in her native tongue. It was too bad she had just swallowed or she might have tried to hold a conversation with him in this language.

“Sure. I know lots of stuff, dude,” she smiled, her flickering instant of melancholy quickly forgotten in the moment of sharing with the man she was falling in love with. “Cherry was really awesome. She taught me all sorts of great stuff about food and boys and sex. I learned how to make omelets and chili and wear lipstick without looking like a circus clown. Ever had your prostate massaged? She said some guys really like that.”

Joel swallowed hard, eyes wide. Ellie giggled and blushed while he coughed.

The man continued to sing from time capsule of the old vinyl record playing inside the jukebox, a song from well before Ellie’s time and a few years before Joel’s day as well.

“ _I’m so caught up in you, little girl, that I never wanna get myself free_.”

“I really like this song,” Ellie smiled, slightly buzzing from the beer.

Joel said nothing, but he remembered all too well how much Tess had liked it too. 38 Special and ZZ Top had provided the soundtrack to their lovemaking on many a night. He wondered what it would be like to make love to Ellie with this music playing. Wrong and immoral, sure, but scaldingly hot. And probably nostalgic too.

Lord, what would Tess think of me if she knew about these notions running through my head lately, Joel thought and tried to swallow the rising lust along with the beer in his mouth.

Neither went down easy.

**. . .**

“Oh, man,” Ellie said excitedly in a half-whisper, even as she tried to mimic his stoic manner. She belched into her small fist. “Shit! That was _good_. So where do we go next, Joel?”

“We still got a fair stretch of time before our bike’s ready, I reckon. We’ll look around and see what else this place has,” Joel said, adjusting the straps on his backpack. It was filled with most of his shotgun ammo, making it heavier than usual. Having that Gold Wing had made it a lot easier to carry extra ammo. It would have been hard to make a trip across America limited to just a few rounds in his pack.

She smiled at the words ‘our bike’ and as he reached out to place his hand on her shoulder, she was positively more radiant than the warm rays of the midday sun.

Resting his hand lightly on her shoulder, he eased her towards himself, moving the girl out of the doorway of the diner before the person coming up behind her had to shove the teenager aside.

“People comin’ through, Ellie. Scootch over.”

“Oh! Sorry!” she said, stepping aside quickly, getting out of the way. She was flustered and a little embarrassed, but happy all the same – Joel didn’t take his hand off her shoulder right away. It lingered there for a long and wonderful moment, warm and strong and reassuring. She wanted to smile at him but she grinned at her shoes instead.

Christ, he thought to himself. This is one gorgeous girl. Now get your hand off her, dumbass, before you make her feel uncomfortable or something.

His stubborn hand was slow to obey as he spoke. “C’mon, young lady. As I recall, teenage girls in my day just _loved_ to go shoppin’. Let’s get some supplies. Whaddya say?”

“Sounds good, Joel,” she said, daring to make eye contact with him in that achingly intense moment before his hand left her body. Love for him danced in her eyes and, in the few heartbeats before he led her out into the street, she hoped he could see it.

**. . .**

Just as the guard had told them, the inner market of Burlington had a little bit of everything. Just this one row of buildings alone had a barber, a music store, several clothing stores, a medical clinic with the services of both a doctor and a dentist available, and a place called ‘The Bunkhouse’ where you could rent a bed for the night (overnight pass required, of course).

‘Under The Stars’ was a squat, square, mixed red and orange brick building that sold camping equipment and things like that. Ellie purchased a compass and a small roll of aluminum foil, the better to save leftovers in for snacking. Joel bought a pup tent and a heavy canvas satchel with a sturdy, adjustable strap. It reminded him of the big bag Indiana Jones always wore in those movies he planned to tell Ellie about one day. He said he was going to hang the satchel on the side of the bike and store extra supplies in it. In the meantime, he wore it across his body, just like Indy had.

“Can you believe it’s already October 10th?” Ellie asked, stepping out onto the market streets. The store had a current, locally made calendar on the wall by the clock “It was… what… the 20th of September when we left Boston, right?”

“Yeah. I think so,” Joel said, emerging from the cool shadows of the store interior, a few steps behind his enthusiastic young partner. Tess had been the record keeper, not him. He had fallen into a habit of drifting from day to day these last few years. Timekeeping wasn’t important to him the way it had been to Tess. “We’re gonna have to make better time if we’re gonna get to Wyoming ahead of the snows.”

Ellie tried not to think about that. She wasn’t in any hurry. She knew she should be. The world was depending on her. But she wanted to spend as much time with this man as she could. She wanted him to stay with her, to keep her around, to keep her in his life, to be her friend… to _be_ with her… in that way.

She needed to move the topic away from any potential parting. She couldn’t let him think about that, couldn’t let him get comfortable with the idea of passing her off to his brother. She had to cement herself into his life, to make him think of her as an indispensable part of his world. She could do that with humor. She told her brain to think of something funny to say, and not just a joke, but something she could tease him with. Something that could be a running joke for a while.

The zip-up red flannel jacket and the red fleece hoodie Ellie had bought at the clothing store between the music store and the diner fit inside Joel’s new satchel just perfectly. She grinned as she dropped the roll of foil down into the bag hanging at his side, on top of the clothes she had stuffed in there earlier. She had been grinning a lot today. Joel wanted her to smile all the time now.

“Still lots of room in your purse,” she teased, picturing her brain giving itself a pat on the back. “Where to next?”

“Let’s look around, see what we can find. And it ain’t a purse, damn it.”

“Cool. Maybe we can find a comic book shop. I can complete my Savage Starlight collection. Can I put those in your purse too, grandma?”

“Enough room for a good beatin’ stick in there too, you know,” he grumped. “Want me to check if I have one handy?”

She rolled her eyes and grabbed his wrist, pulling him along behind her as she moved down the street. Time was wasting. He was trying not to smile. She knew she might never get a chance to visit a place like this again.

**. . .**

“Why doesn’t _everyone_ come here?” Ellie asked, poking around the t-shirts piled atop an old card table inside the second clothing store they had visited today. The security guard paid by the shop keep watched her discreetly but intently from his spot just inside the doorway, a nightstick tucked into his belt. “Seems like a safer place to live than a pawn shop or a Motel 6.”

“Burlington don’t want more citizens, squirt. Just customers. They’re probably very picky about the folks they offer permanent residency to,” Joel answered, settling on a brown flannel shirt with a classic check pattern. It was getting much cooler at night. Early October now, the shop keep at the counter had told him, a powerful selling point for the cold weather garments on display.

“Why not? More people living here means more people to defend the city against bad guys. Right?” she asked, weighing the decision between two different but equally desirable long-sleeved shirts. She couldn’t decide which one she wanted. “Strength in numbers, you know.”

“More people means more mouths to feed, kiddo.” Joel said as he passed her, flannel shirt in hand, on his way to the sales counter. “Too many people get in and you’ll wind up with ration lines and riots eventually.”

“Like Pittsburgh,” she said, looking up at him, understanding in her eyes.

“Like Pittsburgh,” he agreed, placing a pair of shotgun shells on the counter.

“Shirt’s just two pistol bullets,” the man on the other side said. “You got two of those instead? Or do you want me to make change? Three pistol rounds to a shotgun shell or a rifle bullet, three shells to a can of meat, two shells for a can of something else. That’s the rate here.”

The conversion rate seemed to change a little from shop to shop, Joel had noticed. Price of doing a business in a place like this. Bartering was always a sliding scale and rarely in the favor of the one doing the buying.

“Buyin’ a pair of shirts for her too,” Joel said with a nod in her general direction.

“Thanks, Joel,” she said, beaming. She quickly jogged over to the counter with both shirts in her hand. She laid the garments on the counter. “Here you go. I’m going to go look at the jeans, okay?”

“That’s fine,” said the shop keep. “We got a few in your size, I think. Far end of that table, by the fan in the corner.”

“Thanks,” she said, making her way slowly to that end of the shop, looking at everything she could as she passed the various tables. All the piles were interesting to her, even though most of clothes clearly weren’t in her size. It was still fun to look.

The shop’s security guard watched her like a hawk. Joel prayed that she understood this wasn’t like the basement in Bill’s church. Sticky fingers got broken quick in a place like this.

“But what if a bunch of people show up and don’t leave?” Ellie asked over her shoulder, returning to their earlier conversation. “What if they get here and they’re too scared to go back to Pittsburgh or wherever?”

“Ellie…” Joel sighed with a shake of his head.

The man behind the counter spoke. “Anybody intentionally overstaying their pass who can’t pay for extra time gets branded on the back of both hands and thrown out. They don’t get back into Burlington after that. They get a bullet in the head if they try.”

“Really? Yikes,” Ellie said, idly rubbing the back of her hand, the one with the weird black squiggles on it. “Kind of harsh.”

“She don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Joel said to the shopkeep. “She just has lots of questions. Lots and _lots_ of questions.”

“I understand,” the man said pointedly. “And now she’s got answers.”

Ellie didn’t want a repeat of the lecture in the garage. She changed tack swiftly.

“Are there other places like this?” she asked Joel, holding a pair of black denim jeans tightly across her waist that she thought might fit. Her mouth turned down glumly when she saw that they were much too wide through the hips.

“Used to be quite a few of ‘em. But I think they’re just about all gone now,” Joel said, leaning back against the wall by the counter window. “Only ones I know of that are still around these days are this town, a river town up north called Hawkesbury, and maybe a town up near the Great Lakes called Ishpeming.”

“What about Chatham?” the security guard asked. “Pirate port west of Boston. It’s still there, last I heard.”

“Nah,” Joel said with shrug. “We just came from Boston. Chatham got too successful. The Boston battalion hit ‘em real hard back in May. Hammered ‘em with every old Coast Guard cutter they had. The Fireflys are tryin’ to do somethin’ with the place, or so I hear tell, but it’s more rubble than anythin’ else now.”

“Shit. I didn’t know that,” the guard said. He sighed sadly. “Damn. My cousin’s in Chatham. We’re from the Hartford, QZ originally. He wanted to be closer to home. Said a man could rise pretty high in Chatham since it was still growing so fast… but now… Shit. Hope Dennis made it back to Hartford.”

Ellie looked up at Joel, her eyes full of questions and sympathy. He nodded to her, letting her make the decision.

“Hartford’s gone too,” she said.

“What?” the guard asked, his eyes going wide behind the face shield of his helmet.

“We had some friends from Hartford. They said the QZ had fallen,” Ellie spoke, the tone of her voice and the expression on her face offering empathy to the man. She didn’t know what else to say. “Sorry.”

“Fuck,” the guard said and looked out the door of the shop, pushing back the grief.

“More and more of that these days,” the shop keep said to no one in particular. “QZs are finally running out of steam, I guess. Wichita and Kansas City are gone. Atlanta. Des Moines too, just last year. Man, we had so many refugees from there that we had to turn away when winter came. They tried to build a shanty town down the road from the gates. We had to chase them off. It was… rough… But what else could we do? Might’ve lost the whole city if we didn’t. Would’ve turned into a damn nesting ground eventually.”

“Shanty towns draw the infected,” Ellie whispered under her breath, too quiet for anyone in the room to hear, her eyes focused on the pile of small and petite sized jeans. There was a truth to those words that she understood now. She almost wished she didn’t. Not knowing, not understanding things like that was easier to live with sometimes.

“The outlaw strongholds ain’t farin’ much better than the QZs lately,” Joel groused, using the old term so favored by FEDRA back in the days when they still bothered to produce propaganda to sway opinions, back before they realized that it was a lot easier just to hit anybody who complained with rubber bullets and nightsticks until they shut their mouth and got with the program. “Helena is gone now, I hear. Chatham too. And there used to be this place called Suffolk that was a lot like Burlington. A little smaller, maybe, but thrivin’. That’s what everybody said. But by the time me and my brother and our crew got there back in ’23, on our way up from Georgia, the place had fallen apart. The Norfolk QZ had collapsed and refugees had flooded in and just ate the place down to the bone like a buncha locusts. Guess that almost happened here too.”

“That’s why we had to turn all those poor souls away,” the shop keep said with a resigned, ‘what can you do’ exhalation.

“So Burlington is the last place like this left” Ellie asked as she approached the counter, a pair of khaki cargo pants in her hands. A little too long in the legs and not the denim she preferred, but pants were pants.

“Pants are five pistol bullets, young lady. And we had a few people in here a month or two ago. They said that Free Fargo was still doing okay.”

“Minneapolis battalion never wiped ‘em out?” Joel said, pleasantly surprised by this news. He handed Ellie a shotgun shell as she was digging pistol bullets from her pocket to pay for the pants. He returned her grateful smile with a nod.

“Nope,” the man said, taking the shell and a pair of bullets from the girl. “In fact, the QZ kind of depends on those guys now, for food and such.”

“No shit?” Joel chuckled. “FEDRA turnin’ to smugglers for help? Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Yeah. Those Firefly idiots tried to take the Minneapolis QZ in ’28. They failed, like they always do, but the morons blew the fucking Dartmouth Bridge as one last big ‘fuck you’ to FEDRA before they ran away. Now Minneapolis is pretty much isolated.”

Ellie drifted over to the table with all the women’s underwear. She had her eye on a small pile of silly, impractical, lacy bras.

“The bridge over the Mississippi?” Joel asked, trying not to see the things she was holding up, looking at carefully, pressing against her body to take a rough estimate of the fit. Sheer, flimsy things a girl her age had no business wearing.

“Yeah. One of the last ones. There’s still an old MSZ south of Minneapolis, if you can believe that, encamped at La Crosse. They’re dug in tight and holding on to the bridge there until relief comes from the Milwaukee QZ, which isn’t likely any time soon since Chicago just folded and the battalion up there is too busy driving away stragglers coming up from Chi Town.” The man placed his hands on the counter and rested his weight on his arms. He shook his head as he shared the news. It was all bad news these days, or so it seemed.

“Is there a room I can try this on?” Ellie asked, holding up a little purple bra with shoestring-thin straps and a design that was more interested in providing sexy peek-a-boo lace instead of concealing fabric. What little opaque coverage the lower half of the small cups offered was really only there to provide a place for the sewn-in pads of latex foam meant to push the breasts up, make them appear bigger, riper.

Joel looked at her with his best ‘are you kidding me’ look. She stuck out her tongue and ignored his unspoken pleas for propriety. They were her bullets to spend.

“Sure. Little closet right over there,” the man behind the counter said. “Light switch is on the wall. Leave your backpack outside the door.”

“Thanks,” Ellie said brightly, the bra and a similarly impractical and revealing pair of immodest purple panties in her hand as she crossed the room.

“Ellie…” Joel said quietly, firmly. “I ain’t payin’ for _those_.”

“I got it covered,” Ellie said casually, without looking back over her shoulder. She dropped her backpack on the floor, stepped into the closet and closed the door behind her. She flicked on the light.

Joel noticed that about eighteen inches or so had been cut off the bottom and top of the door, making it just a little harder for anyone inside to shoplift. Inside the little room, Ellie began to hum that old song from the diner’s jukebox. Joel watched through the gap beneath the door as she pulled her off her shoes and shimmied her jeans down around her ankles. She stepped out of them, kicking the denim loose with red-socked feet. He could just see the very top of her head over the edge of the door. She raised her arms up. A moment later, her red t-shirt was draped over the top of the door. Her black thermal shirt appeared a few seconds later. Joel swallowed hard and looked away just as her sturdy, practical, and oh-my-god-so-much-more-sensible red sports bra made its appearance there too. She was more than half naked in there and he hoped to heaven that nobody was looking in through a peephole or anything. Her bite mark would be hard to miss, even for a horny peeping Tom.

“You were sayin’? About Minneapolis?” Joel muttered to the shop keep, trying not to hear Ellie softly singing that old .38 Special song, trying not to think of her slipping into those skimpy little panties, that sexy push-up bra.

Christ, he thought. I’m just as bad as any peeping Tom.

“So caught up in you, little girl,” she sang in a soft voice that echoed out from the little closet, “that I never wanna get myself free…”

“Yeah. I was saying that there’s a ton of bandits camped out between Minneapolis and La Crosse. Neither place has enough troops to spare to clean them out, and more bandits would just come in and replace them if they tried. The only thing keeping the QZ afloat is all those smugglers in Fargo. Guys are getting rich, I bet.”

“I’ll bet,” Joel agreed. He knew how lucrative being a smuggler could be. Seven years working with Tess and her crew in Boston and they’d never gone hungry, not once, not even when the rations got really strict for months and months after half the damn Montpelier battalion had rolled into town back in ’26.

“Mmm mmm m-mmm the love I’d missed,” Ellie sang quietly, humming the words she couldn’t remember, the achingly sweet sound reaching Joel no matter how hard he tried to tune her out. “So hot! Love I couldn’t quite resist…”

God, I remember giving it to Tess good and hard with that song playing, he thought, the memories of it coming upon him unbidden. Flashes of his old partner, naked, moaning, skin slick with sweat, lips parted in ecstasy, red hair spread out across the pillow.

Brown hair, he reminded himself firmly. Tess had brown hair. And you don’t need to be thinking about Tess neither. Not now. Not here. Not ever again, damn it. Gone is gone.

“But I don’t think the MSZ at La Crosse is going to last much longer,” the man behind the counter said. “The Colonel there is a real hard ass, they say. He won’t deal with ‘stragglers’. So the soldiers at that bridge are either going to starve, run out of bullets, or kill the bastard and promote someone else to colonel. Somebody who will deal with civilians like us. They don’t do that, then that MSZ is living on borrowed time.”

“I thought the MSZs were all gone,” Ellie said, stepping out of the changing room, her sneakers unlaced, and the smutty purple underwear in her hands. She scooped up her pack and approached the counter, bullets in hand, ready to buy. “Weren’t they declared obsolete in April of 2014? Didn’t FEDRA decide that building and maintaining numerous, small Triage Centers and Military Safe Zones was an inefficient use of available resources that would be better spent on a smaller number of larger and more defensible Quarantine Zones and a bunch of shit like that?”

“That’ll be six pistol bullets, total, for the bra and panties. The frilly ones cost more than the other kind. They’re harder to come by these days.”

“Cause they ain’t built to last,” Joel grumped, not happy with Ellie’s newfound interest in impractical clothing.

“Shhh!” Ellie hushed him with a devilish smirk, counting out bullets.

The shop keep took the ammunition from her as she put the remaining bullets in her pocket and proceeded to tuck the black thermal shirt into her blue jeans.

“There’s still a few of the MSZs around. But you’re right, young lady,” the man said, returning to her earlier question. “FEDRA did get rid of most of them a long time ago.”

She nodded and dropped to one knee to tie her shoes. One thing the instructors in the military preparatory school had taught her was all about the exciting and inspiring history of the noble military protectors who provided her with every good thing in her life.

She folded the underwear, the t-shirts, and the khaki pants into a neat little bundle and put it in Joel’s satchel. She glanced up at him, a smile on her face, a joke about his purse on her lips. The joke went untold when she noticed the expression on his face.

Joel was looking at her with raised eyebrows, bemused and a little worried. She didn’t know about how people had been gunned down outside the walls of the QZs, beating on the gates, begging to be let in. But she knew the date the QZ plan went into effect? He smirked and shook his head. An amused snort slipped from his nostrils.

“What?” she asked innocently and a bit defensively. “I went to class. Most of the time.”

**. . .**

“Kind of sad to think Burlington is one of the last places like this,” Ellie said, crunching her way through a piece of sugary rock candy. The white string threaded through the center of it hung from the corner of her mouth, dancing about as she chewed.

Joel finished his oatmeal cookie and glanced at the clock on the wall of the boot shop across the street from where the two of them stood in the scant shade of the striped awning stretched over the wooden stall and all the shelves festooned with sweet treats. Half an hour left. It would be time to head back to the garage soon. The lady who ran the candy stall probably wanted them to move as soon as Ellie finished her candy.

“I used to do a lot business with this man named Robert, back in Boston,” Joel said. “He had a few boats.”

“Boats? Really? Cool. I wish we had a boat. We could sail the Mississippi like Huckleberry Finn.” Every other word was punctuated with crunching.

“Safer than the highway, so long as you don’t caught by patrols or pirates,” Joel said. “Robert was always sailing them up the coast. He supposedly knew of some place up in Maine that does a lot of tradin’ with some Indian tribe in Canada. Little town called Lubec, I think. So there’s a still few more places you could go shoe shoppin’ one day, I guess.”

“I wanted some boots like yours,” she grumbled, the hard, yellow candy cracking loudly between her teeth.

“Yeah. Too bad you got such little feet, girl. All those shoes for sale and not one pair of ‘em in your size.”

“You should have bought some new boots, grandma. Something beige to match your pretty purse.”

“We’re both about to do a year of hard time when I smack those freckles off you, kiddo,” he chuckled.

She giggled. “You keep saying your gonna beat me. _But you never dooo_ ,” she sang the last words sweetly, affectionately.

He crossed his arms and hid most of a smile. “I’ll get around to it one of these days.”

She cackled and threw the string away, the last of the candy gone. A closely guarded prisoner on work detail would be along soon to sweep it up. There were several of the manacled, ankle-chained unfortunates to be seen around the inner market. It was probably the lightest form of punishment this place inflicted on criminals.

“You know,” he said, “that stuff’ll last longer if you suck it instead of chew it.”

“Ooh! Speaking of sucking things,” she said mischievously, pointing to a building across the street and a few doors down from the boot shop. “Ever go to a place like that?”

Joel looked. A pair of underdressed women and one shirtless man loitered out front, flaunting their wares. The windows were blacked out and the sign over the door read ‘The Love Shack’. The man saw Ellie pointing at them and he blew a kiss. The women noticed as well and stuck a sexy pose.

“Cool,” Ellie said. “I think they like us, Joel. Can we go over there?”

He shook his head. “Hell, no. We ain’t ‘ _goin’ over there_ ’. Jesus, girl.”

“What? I’ve never been to a place like that, Joel. Maybe I should, you know? I might learn something new.”

“Ellie, you’re a mess.”

She laughed, a little high on sugar, even more high on life. “What? The prices are listed right there next to the door. They’re my bullets to trade, dude.”

“Hell, kid. The things you say. First those silly purple underwear and now this?”

“What? Maybe I have _needs_ , Joel. Didya ever think of that?”

He cleared his throat and looked away. He hoped she was joking.

“Apparently,” she said in a serious voice, her sharp eyes scanning the sign, “a threesome is _very_ expensive. But a handjob is just three shells. Should I get one of those?”

“Ellie…” He tried very hard not to smile. She didn’t need to be encouraged about grownup stuff like this.

“Is that a good price for a handjob, Joel?” she cackled. “Or have you gotten better deals in other towns?”

“Come on,” he said. ”We’re got a few more things to buy.”

“Okay. But if we have enough bullets left, can we come back here for a threesome?”

She looked up at him as she walked alongside him, her mouth grinning, lips full and inviting, her emerald eyes sparkling in the sunlight, half closed from the midday sun, lashes lowered almost seductively. Her small breasts were firm and prominent against the front of her favorite red t-shirt, the one with the sunset and the palm trees. Her little round ass swayed side to side with each step of her shapely legs.

“I paid for your cookie,” she winked then cooed teasingly. “ _I’ll buy you a handjob too_. I’m cool like that.”

He shot her a look of stunned disbelief. She giggled and leaned her shoulder against his arm just a little as they walked. He almost wrapped his arm around her narrow shoulders but stopped his errant hand just in time. He shook his head instead and inched away from her, just a little, just until there was a respectable amount of daylight between them.

“Christ, you’re a mess, kid. You know that?” he said in that tone she knew so well. The ‘it don’t matter if we’re havin’ a good time, we’re not gonna talk about this particular thing no more’ tone.

“Hee hee,” she snickered and let it go.

He tried to let it go too. He didn’t want to think about it. But he couldn’t get the image out of his head. Ellie, naked in his arms, willing and ready, taking every inch of him. Ellie… and Tess. Both at the same time. With him. With each other. Especially with each other. Tess’s fuller figure, her bigger breasts, her rounder hips, her darker hair. Such a nice contrast to the petite, slim redhead with the smaller but still sweet curves… maybe with her soft little titties pushed up and jiggling inside that hot, skimpy bra… God almighty, the things the three of them could get up to… if only things had turned out differently…

It was a hard image to bury, but it had to go. He had to get it out of his head for lots of reasons, none of which he wanted to think about.

As she walked along, taking in the sights, she never noticed the tightness across the front of his jeans that dogged him for a shameful number of steps before finally fading away.

**. . .**

There was only one proper bookstore in the inner market. A few stalls had old magazines and the like for sale alongside other, unrelated items. But if you wanted to buy real books in Burlington, the only place to get them was ‘Maps, Manuals, & More’.

Joel stood outside the front of the shop, making a very great show of deciding whether or not they were going to go inside. Beside him, Ellie was practically vibrating with excitement.

“We’re going inside, right?” she asked, bouncing on the balls of her feet, biting her lip, her eyes open wide, pleading with him with shimmering emerald intensity. Puppy dog eyes.

“I don’t know, kiddo. It’s getting pretty late. That clock in there says it’s twenty till two.”

“But they might have a pun book! C’mon! We’re gonna look, right?”

“A pun book? Shit! Then we _really_ oughta head back.”

“Awww. Don’t be a dick. You love my jokes.” Her hands were open at her side, her mouth agape with disappointment, her face vacillating between heartbreak and outright begging. “Pleeeeeease?”

“I’m only kiddin’, Ellie,” Joel answered with a smug half-smile. “We need to get some maps so we can figure out the best way to Tommy’s. Come on. We’ll look around.”

“Fuck yeah! Pun books! Woo!”

“Oh lord. What did I just get myself into?” he sighed dramatically as she grabbed his hands with both of hers and began to drag him into the store. “But be quick, okay? We gotta get back to the bike pretty soon.”

“Gotcha, boss. In and out. Lickety split. PDQ. FYI. BBQ.” She was filled with joy. Gloriously, beautifully, vibrantly alive. She led him into the store, walking backwards, pulling him along, smiling, holding his hands in hers with every step, loving, loveable, lovely.

Joel wanted her so bad his chest ached.

**. . .**

She helped him load their stuff back into the compartments of the bike and waited patiently while he returned with their guns from the safety of the locker inside the armory. She slipped her pistol into her waistband, slung her cut-down shotgun from her shoulder, and felt a little safer again. Joel told her to put her helmet on and she did with reluctance. She wanted to see and hear and smell this place unfiltered for as long as she could. As much as she wanted to pretend otherwise, she felt sure she would never see this incredible city again. The guard’s CBI scanners would be fixed soon, or replacement ones would find their way here sooner or later. Everything seemed to find its way here eventually.

Everything but pun books, unfortunately.

She sighed. No place was perfect, not even Burlington.

They drove out of town, threading their way through milling pedestrians, being waved from the outer market’s checkpoint to the transfer zone by the tank. Ellie spoke in his hear, noting how weird it was to have to stop for traffic and stuff. Joel agreed. But they’d be quit of this place soon enough. Ellie wasn’t happy about that, but she kept it to herself.

At the transfer zone, an enforcer read the squiggles on the front of the Gold Wing. He asked them which way they were headed now that they were leaving Burlington. Joel told him they were going west. The man added more squiggles to the markings and pointed them to another checkpoint further down US 34, away from the market and the bridge. Joel took the Honda there slowly, easing the bike around vehicles and people along the way. From there it was onto another checkpoint and then the next one after that, until they reached the junction of US 34 and US 61, in the heart of Burlington. Those off-ramps were heavily guarded, leading into the safe, settled, walled-in parts of the city. The enforcers there waved them on. No stopping there, no business there. They were daypassers. The newly added mark on the bike said they were outbound, so it was time for them to get out. They rode on to the last checkpoint, the exit, the last stop before it was back out onto the open road and the ruined hell of infected America.

The gates here were worthy of a QZ. There was no natural barrier on this end of the city, no giant river with only two bridges across, easy to defend. This gate was armored and thick. Two gates, really. One inner and one outer. Heavy machine guns and belt-fed grenade launchers and powerful floodlights guarded these high walls, providing the protection here that the Mississippi did on the east side of the city. The men around them wore gas masks and many of them carried flamethrowers with big fuel tanks on their backs or rotary, drum-fed grenade launchers. They flagged Joel to a stop and he didn’t dare ignore the signal.

Oddly flat pops sounded around them, bouncing off the abandoned buildings on the other side of the double set of fences that lined either side of the highway, keeping the road separated from the unused, uninhabited parts of Burlington. There could be anything out there and only regular patrols kept it whatever it was from getting out of hand. More distorted firecracker pops echoed around them again.

“Gunshots?” Ellie asked.

“Yeah,” Joel said.

“Some infected showed up this morning,” the guard nearest to them said through the filters of his mask. “A few of ‘em slipped around one of our patrols and got a little too close to the highway on the other side of the gate. Gotta clear ‘em out before we open the gate.”

“Thanks,” Joel said. He knew it wasn’t for his safety they were doing it, but he was grateful all the same.

The radio on the man’s belt crackled to life.

“West Gate, this is Checkpoint Six. Shift change complete. Got a white Ford van with three, ready to depart.”

The man spoke into his radio as a few more scattered, flattened pops echoed from the buildings all around them.

“Hold them there. Still have the red bike with two waiting.”

“Okay,” came the reply. “Holding here.”

“Is it gonna be safe for us to go out there, Joel?” Ellie asked, her voice just a little higher and more nervous that usual.

“They won’t open those gates ‘till it is, kiddo. It won’t be long,” Joel said, patting the outside of her thigh reassuringly. He chuckled, “Besides, I gotta get you outta here before you spend all your bullets gettin’ up to no good at ‘The Love Shack’.”

“Awww. And I wanted to go too,” she teased.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“Pfft! You big dork. Get real. You know me better than _that_ ,” she said.

“Hell, I hope I do. But I can’t be sure what you’ll do sometimes, you wild child.”

He shook his head and kept his face turned towards the highway ahead and the opening gates. In front of them, returning trucks filled with heavily armed men dressed in body armor and wearing gas masks began to pull into town.

She swallowed hard, summoned up all her courage, and flipped up the visor of the helmet. She leaned in close to speak softly to him.

He turned his head slightly to hear her, his eyes still on the enforcers being decontaminated and inspected. The moustached man from the tank team who had met them on the way into the city was there, an army issue CBI scanner was in his hand. Maybe the only one they had? Maybe they reserved it for hazardous duty work like this? Trying to make it last, saving it for when they really needed it, getting by on visual inspections for visitors who were corralled in by fences anyway, kept away from the residents in the rest of the city, risking only the market until more scanners could be found? Joel couldn’t be certain, but he knew he needed to get Ellie out of here pretty quick and they couldn’t risk coming back again. More scanners would find their way to the city soon enough, probably pulled out of the rubble of an abandoned QZ. And there were more of those every year. How long until there wasn’t any place left to go? How long before the roads were empty for good, abandoned by whoever was left in this shitty fucked up world, too dangerous to trav-

His train of thought was suddenly derailed by Ellie.

Her voice was smoky in his ear, a voice that barely carried over the din of the city around them, a voice that seemed to be filled with promises and questions and excitement and trepidation, all mixed up together. A voice meant only for his ears.

“I don’t want my first time with a guy to be in a place like _that_ , Joel. I want it to be… you know… _special_.”

Joel looked back at her, his eyes a mix of disbelief and shock behind the amber lenses of his shooter’s glasses, but she had lost her nerve and was already looking away, her eyes on something else. He could see a faint rose tinge to her cheeks inside the helmet. Her lovely eyes were half closed, shyly. His cock grew hard against the seat of the Gold Wing, burning him with a familiar, shameful hunger for the girl on the seat behind him, her ripening body so close and so warm.

Oh lord, he prayed, feeling his dick throbbing, his body craving an unforgivable union with the girl, please don’t tell me she meant that how it sounded.

But he knew she did. He remembered the way she had said his name while in the grips of her erotic dream. He remembered it vividly. He thought about it often.

The gate was open. An enforcer walked over and smeared the grease pencil markings on their bike into an illegible mess with an old rag. She spoke to them through her gas mask.

“All right, our team says it’s clear. But if I were you, I wouldn’t drive slow. Just in case.”

“Thanks,” Joel nodded, levering the bike into first gear, trying to pretend he wasn’t hard as a rock against the seat of the Honda.

“Thanks for letting us visit,” Ellie said cheerfully. “You guys have a really cool town.”

The guard’s eyes smiled behind her mask, surprised by the teenager’s friendliness.

“You take care,” the woman replied, and waved them through the gates, chuckling as they rode away. The redhead had been an unexpected bright spot in her humdrum day.

**. . .**

Ken and his guys did good work. The bike was handling even better then when he had first found it. The throttle was smooth too. He twisted it open wider and wider, gaining speed with every revolution of the wheels. They roared through the outskirts of the city, his eyes on the highway, Ellie’s on the empty, abandoned buildings on either side of the highway. There were no protective fences here to keep the highway isolated from the world, so Joel kept them moving ever faster in case there were still infected lurking in those empty structures that zipped by them in a blur. Or hunters, waiting for the perfect shot. Or refugees who might be desperate enough to think they might have a fair chance of pulling down a slow moving Honda, dragging them away from it, taking the bike for themselves… Any number of unpleasant events were possible out here.

They rocketed past an armored, turreted humvee patrolling the fringes. They roared through the intersection of US 34 and Mt. Pleasant Street, and suddenly the city was behind them. Broad open fields of green were ahead of them. A large, blue lake was on their left, approaching fast, then behind them in a blur of azure and sparkles. The horizon stretched out before them, flat and green all the way forward to the seamless weld of the world to the bright blue sky above.

Ellie expected him to slow down now but he didn’t. He had heard the radio chatter. Behind them somewhere was a white Ford van with three people inside. He didn’t know them, didn’t want to know them. He wanted to be long gone before those people cleared the gate. Joel knew the rules of the road. Larger groups preyed on smaller ones. Three in the van. Two on this bike. Simple math.

Behind him, Ellie kept watch, her shotgun tight against her chest, her legs wrapped around the body of the Honda, her body enjoying the wonderful vibrations, her mind enjoying the presumed safety of the open road, thankful for the free time it afforded her to think all sorts of inexperienced but eager and lustful thoughts about this man she was riding with. She knew she wanted him. Her wet pussy was more than proof of that.

Once Burlington was well and truly behind them, no longer so much as a smudge on the receding horizon, and the world was comfortably empty in every direction, Joel eased the bike down to a slower speed and took them deeper into the emptiness. Ellie grabbed the straps of his backpack and held onto them tightly. She nuzzled against him, resting her helmeted head on his shoulder. His cock remained rock hard for at least twenty miles.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For my money, the chance to show Joel and Ellie passing through a “free city” was a missed opportunity in the game. I know it’s a video game and you need enemies to fight, but Left Behind showed that you could have conversations with other people that don’t end in broken fingers and flying machetes. Not everyone in this world would need to be hunters to get by. Given the right leadership and the availability of enough manpower and weapons, a safe zone could be carved out somewhere, now that cordyceps outbreaks are no longer exploding across the world. The worst of the pandemic and the subsequent crisis seems to be far in the past by 2033 and small, quiet communities like those managed by Maria and David (and Ish) are beginning to appear.
> 
> There might be other, even bigger communities that, if not outright friendly (because that will get you killed), would at least be strong enough to discourage attacks against them while being large enough to allow for trade and other forms of business. Genuine civilization will take root in successful communities both large and small and allow people to slowly begin to take back the world.
> 
> We got a glimpse of such a place in Jackson, but other communities must have sprung up, and key locations like bridges are the perfect place for them. We know that people are still driving the roads of America – that the bandits in Pittsburgh have a plan involving funneling cars into the “bus trap” means that Joel and Ellie aren’t the first people to come along in a truck. Further, the Mississippi cuts the country in half and there are surprisingly few bridges across it. The river is so massive (a mile wide in places) that most roads combine as they approach it just so fewer bridges have to built and maintained to span it. I figure FEDRA would have destroyed most of the bridges on that river to limit the movement of people and the spread of cordyceps (it’s the perfect natural barrier – infected can’t swim!). However, as the “Military Safe Zones” begin to fall apart and the army retreats to the new QZs, some of the bridges would have to be abandoned. By that time, with the QZ plan in place, FEDRA may no longer have the desire (or the Air Force assets) to destroy any more bridges. If just one “free bridge” could be reclaimed and cleaned up by an enterprising group, then they’ve set themselves up as “Merchant Kings” for any and all traffic that wants to cross the country in their vicinity. People need to trade and cities are where that’s done. People like Robert and Tess, given half a chance, would thrive in a free city where people come to trade and sell what they’ve scavenged in open markets and storefronts rather than in the ramshackle stalls of the Boston slums. Cordyceps or not, people are resourceful and our basic needs do not change. We want to buy and sell. Even though we never see such a place as Burlington in the game, you cannot convince me that there aren’t such places in a post-pandemic world. As long as there are still humans gathered together on the earth, there will be merchants.
> 
> For the purposes of my story, Burlington is the only standing bridge across the Mississippi that isn’t under military control by 2033. However, it seems to mostly use a scavenger economy. Very little is being produced there. If they don’t adopt a model like Tommy’s, with a focus on crops and livestock and other renewable commodities, Burlington may face a crisis in the years to come. Unless people keep bringing food and goods to the city, Burlington could find itself in the same situation as most of the remaining Quarantine Zones.
> 
> The music on the jukebox is “Back Where You Belong” and “Caught Up In You” by 38 Special. 
> 
> Lastly, the hustle and bustle of this place was so great that it drown out Ellie’s interior monologue, I guess. Her inner voice is a fun and easy way for me to bring some flavor into a chapter, but every now and then I like to challenge myself and write a story without it. In this case, foregoing Ellie’s running mental commentary made it seem to me that Ellie was overwhelmed by the market and all the people, especially since it’s been pretty much just her and Joel since they left Boston. It made her seem smaller to me somehow, almost as though she would be in danger of being swallowed up by this place if she wasn’t careful.
> 
> Even more lastly, this massive chapter was originally even longer. I trimmed a big chunk of it out and I’ll rework it into a standalone chapter called “News Of The World” that will appear in the collection of one-shots and deleted sex scenes in volume four of this series… one of these days.
> 
> And most very lastly, before anyone rushes to wikipedia to prove me wrong, I know that the Mississippi isn’t the longest river in the world. That honor belongs to the Nile.
> 
> See you in a few days when we marvel at the wonders of crushed pineapple in Chapter Sixteen: Bill.


	16. Bill

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As the day draws to a close and the Mississippi River is now miles and miles behind them, Ellie and Joel stop and make camp, taking inventory of their newly purchased items and enjoying the change of seasons as summer fades and the leaves begin to fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I missed the Wednesday update. I’ve been very, very busy this week. I just came home from an eleven hour shift. That’s that *shortest* workday I’ve had all week. I have to work Saturday too. I think by the time it’s all done, I’ll have well more than eighty hours logged this week. Next week looks to be kind of crazy too, so there might not be a Wednesday update again. My apologies, but work pays the bills, you know.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 16 – Bill**

 

The trees were turning orange, red, and gold. To Ellie, a girl who grew up surrounded by concrete and brick, it was a sight too beautiful for words. That didn’t stop her from trying, of course.

“Shit, Joel,” she said, her voice loud enough to carry over the wind rushing past them, “it’s all so damn pretty.”

Joel nodded, his eyes scanning the road ahead. I-34 was split into two halves, a pair of lanes going in each direction, a grassy strip grown wild and tall between the strips of blacktop. A mile from them and drawing closer quickly, an old school bus was blocking most of the two westbound lanes. An old Plymouth sedan was just beyond it, the trunk lid up. No sign of anyone that he could see, and both vehicles looked like they had been deserted for a long time. But taking things like that at face value could leave you bleeding and dying on the side of the road.

Joel released the throttle and let the bike lose speed.

“Eyes front, Ellie,” he said, and felt her adjust her position on the seat behind him. She was unlimbering her shotgun.

“Right,” she said crisply.

The windows of the bus were dirty and grimed over. Several were broken. No shapes could be seen moving inside. No fungus grew where they could see. The tires of the bus were dry rotted and flat. The faded old Plymouth four door was in similar condition, more scenery than car anymore. Ellie’s fingers were nervous on the triggers of her shotgun as the Honda rolled past the old wrecks. Why had they stopped here like this? Why was the trunk of the car open but not the doors? Why was the bus closed up tight? Had they been traveling together, these two vehicles? Had one stopped to help the other? Or to rob it? There was a story here but she didn’t have enough clues to put it together. She kept the twin barrels of her gun pointed at it instead. A fun mystery could become a tragedy real quick if she didn’t keep her guard up. Life had taught her that lesson the hard way.

Soon enough they were past the old, rusting hulks, and Joel twisted the throttle open again, bringing them back to a relatively safe speed of about thirty miles an hour. Enough to put the old, unsolved mystery behind them. A lot of questions just went unanswered these days. That’s the way it was. It wasn’t much solace to a curious mind like Ellie’s but she was learning to live with it. She snugged her shotgun to her torso again and went back to admiring the trees. For a few moments, she toyed with the idea of making the journey to Wyoming in a big bus like that one, only cleaned up a bunch. Just the two of them. They could make a little home inside, with a bed and a table and some chairs, safe from the world in there, a nice place to sleep every night. Just the two of them. Of course, they would make love every time the sun went down and then snuggle together inside his sleeping bag. And they would be in no hurry to get to Wyoming. Some days, they might not travel at all. Just find a nice place with a pretty view and stay inside the bus all day, warm and safe and naked in their little rolling home. They wouldn’t wear clothes at all on days liked that and they could make love in the daylight, share stories, tell jokes, laugh, kiss, touch, and be happy together. It would be great and sexy and cool and super fucking awesome.

Joel felt Ellie shift about a little on the seat behind him.

“Yeah. I tell you, Ellie, I love this time of year,” Joel said, assuming she was still taking in the sights of the changing leaves.

“Me too,” Ellie said, leaning close to make sure he could hear her. “I love this so much, Joel.”

His cock grew hard against the seat of the Gold Wing. She leaned against him and rested her helmeted head on his shoulder. Her little hands slid around his waist to hold him tightly.

“I really, really do,” she said happily, barely loud enough to hear.

He wanted to fuck her very badly and could barely focus on the road for the next few miles.

 

* * *

 

The church had been painted white once upon a time. But it was mostly bare wood now, half rotted and slowly falling in upon itself. Someone had painted in large white letters, with thick brushstrokes, ‘Matt 24:21’ across the side of the red brick foundation of the stairs to the front door.

“Matt… Matthew 24:21…” she said, letting the words trail off. She tried to remember the few scraps she could from the bible, but nothing from the Gospel of Matthew came to mind. The first ten years of her life spent in the Saint Philomena’s Children’s Home and all she could remember from the good book were three or four of the ten commandments and most of the best dirty bits from The Song Of Solomon.

_Sister Anne would be so disappointed in me._

“That’s from the Bible,” Joe said, his foot coming down to hold the bike up as it coasted to a stop.

“I’m aware of existence of the Bible, dude,” Ellie chuckled. “I’m not _entirely_ a heathen, you know.”

Joel laughed silently, briefly. She felt the tremors of it in the small hands that were resting lovingly against his hard stomach.

“Knowin’ you, wild child, I figured it was safer not to assume,” the big man smirked, looking back at her just long enough to make a quick flash of eye contact.

A thrill ran through Ellie’s body. She grinned wildly. She loved it when he looked at her like he was really seeing her. She wanted to say something to him. Her mouth started to open, but he was already looking away again. Worry flickered across her otherwise happy features.

_Fuck. I’m so starved for attention. He must think I’m such a dork sometimes._

_C’mon, Ellie. Damn it. Be smooth! Be cool and sexy! Don’t be a dumb kid!_

”So tell me then, Reverend Joel,” Ellie purred, leaning in, her visor up. “What does chapter twenty-four, verse twenty-one of the book of Matthew say?”

“Hell if I know,” Joel shrugged. “Probably something about gettin’ right with the Lord or else it’s your ass. I think that pretty much sums up the whole Bible, kiddo.”

Ellie cackled. Joel downshifted to first gear and put the bike into motion again.

The tall grasses behind the church hid dozens of old grave stones, several of them more than a century old. Many unmarked or hastily marked graves were back there too, believers buried in the early days of the outbreak, the last days of the world they had known, the end times they had long expected but had hoped never to see. She didn’t see any of them, hidden behind the tall blades of green. The Honda rolled down the road and left those people in peace, still waiting.

 

* * *

 

He eased them off the main highway, turning south, crossing the eastbound lanes and bringing the Gold Wing onto a small gravel road marked as ‘Pine Ave.’ that intersected I-34. The sun wouldn’t be setting for a while yet. Burlington and the big Mississippi River were maybe fifty miles behind them. There was still some good travel time left, but south was not a direction they needed to go.

“Where are we going?” Ellie asked.

_Someplace quiet and romantic, I hope._

_Please, God. Let him take me someplace romantic and I promise I’ll read the bible and stuff. And not like before. I’ll pay attention this time. I swear. Deal?_

“Saw a sign for a rec area down this way,” Joel answered. “Thought maybe we’d better start lookin’ for a campsite.”

“So soon?” she asked. “Still daylight left.”

“I think we need a little time to sit down and sit down and take inventory,” he said.

_I think we need a little time to sit down and kiss._

_Work with me on this, God. Come on. Don’t be a butt head. Man. Woman. Together. This is what you want, right? So help a girl out already!_

“Okay. Sounds good, Joel.”

 

* * *

 

They never made it to the recreation area. Just a mile or two from the highway, on a side road that looped around to the gravel road they were on, Joel spotted an old UPS truck parked under the branches of a tall oak tree.

The bike crunched to a stop on the gravel.

“What is that?” Ellie asked, looking where he looked. She fumbled a bit with the cinched tight leather strap securing the shotgun to her chest.

“A good place to camp, maybe,” Joel responded.

“What? In that truck? Okay.”

Joel patted her thigh and she dismounted the bike. He worked the kickstand down and killed the engine. With the new battery and the tune-up, he didn’t have to worry if the Honda would start again. Those guys in Burlington had earned their pay and then some. He got off the bike and took his shotgun from the place where it hung behind Ellie’s seat.

“Ups,” Ellie read the gold letters on the side of the brown van. “Worldwide services.”

“UPS,” Joel corrected gently, sounding out each letter. “United Parcel… uhh… Service, I think. They used to deliver packages and stuff.”

“Like the mail man?” Ellie asked, staying close to him as he slowly approached the van.

“Sort of, yeah,” he replied. “These guys would haul anything anywhere to anybody.”

“Oh, okay. Like truckers.”

“Sort of, yeah. These guys hauled all sorts of great stuff. There could be anything in there, girl.”

The weeds had grown tall around the old van, but there were no remains of an old campsite here. It looked like it had been abandoned here a long time ago. The tires were flat, but all the windows were intact. The doors were shut and the top of the van was covered in a scattering of brightly tinted leaves that had fallen from a nearby tree.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and there’ll be a bunch of good stuff still in here,” Joel said as he peered in through a spot he’d wiped clean on the window of the driver’s door. It looked clean and undisturbed inside. The inner door that allowed access to the rear cargo compartment from the driver’s cab was closed too.

“I love getting lucky. Just FYI,” Ellie agreed, hoping he picked up on the double meaning. She smiled slyly but was afraid to make eye contact after she said it.

_You know what I mean, Joel. I know you do._

The door was locked. The passenger side door too. He walked to the back of the truck. If he had caught the double entendre that Ellie had made, he gave no sign. Joel reached for the handle at the bottom of the cargo door at the rear of the van.

“Cover me, Ellie.”

“This is going to be so cool,” Ellie grinned, pointing her shotgun dead ahead, finger resting lightly alongside the trigger. Safety first, just like he had taught her.

“I’m gonna open this,” Joel said, his fingers locked tightly around the edge of the door, “but make sure you don’t blow my fool head off.”

“I won’t, I won’t. _Sheesh_ ,” Ellie sighed dramatically, still half-grinning with anticipation. “I’m not touching the trigger. Just like you taught me, boss.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and there won’t be any infected inside.”

“Please please, let us get lucky,” Ellie whispered as he pulled on the handle of the roll-up door.

The twelve gauge in his off-hand, he pulled on the handle.

Nothing.

“Shit.”

“Locked?”

“Yeah.”

“So… Shoot the lock? Or…?”

“Let’s try somethin’ else.”

**. . .**

The shotgun slung from his shoulder, the Colt pistol in one hand, his other hand wrapped in a thick red rag, Joel brushed the broken glass from the brittle old black gasket. Once it was safe to do so, he reached in through the window and unlocked the passenger’s door. It slid back on its rail with sharp, metallic squeal. Joel stepped inside, shaking the rag loose, fingers outstretched, seeking the handle of the interior door of the cargo bay.

“This goes south, you be ready to run,” he whispered.

_No point in whispering, dude. If they didn’t hear the glass breaking, they sure heard that noisy door._

“Gotcha, boss.”

The inner door squealed too, though not half as loudly as the other one. Joel shined his light inside. Triple-decker shelves ran down the length of the cargo bay, with several boxes still resting on them, waiting patiently to be delivered. The center of the compartment was a walkway that would serve as a good sleeping space, though it might be a little cozy.

“We’re going to sleep in here?” Ellie asked, standing on tiptoe, looking over his shoulder. “Looks cozy.”

“Yeah. That’s a good word for it, I reckon,” he sighed, already anticipating a long, sleepless night with a hard-on while the sexy young girl snoozed close to him.

“So cool.” Her voice sounded almost like a purr to him.

**. . .**

There was a little broom and dustpan in the back. UPS liked to keep their trucks clean, apparently. Ellie put them to good use cleaning away two decades of dust from the floor and sweeping it out the back of the now open cargo door. She smiled and hummed a guitar riff softly, happily, stepping lightly to the beat, her hips swinging to a song she had heard in the diner earlier that day.

“Sometimes days are so hard to survive,” she sang softly. “A million ways to bury you alive.”

She couldn’t remember any more words until she neared the chorus, so she growled the riff until she could pick up the words again, which she was singing joyously when Joel poked his head in to check in on her. She noticed him watching her sing. She blushed but didn’t stop. She sang louder, as if to prove a point to him, or perhaps to herself.

“They say they can break you, again and again,” she crooned, turning the blue plastic broom into her guitar. She beamed a defiant grin at him. “Something something radio! Turn it up to ten!”

Joel chuckled and shook his head affectionately.

“C’mon!” Ellie sang, rocking as hard as she could, wailing the guitar solo as best she could remember. “They try to tell us we don’t belong! But this is our music! And we love it loud! Woooo!!”

She bowed as she more or less reached the end of the song. “Goodnight, Boston! We love you!”

“Thank you, Ace Frehley.” Joel’s laughter was warm and gentle. She wanted to swim in it.

Ellie giggled adorably, straightening up, still blushing. “Who?”

“Guitarist on that song, I think.”

“You know that song?” She was hugging the broom to herself now, almost as though she were trying to hide behind it. She couldn’t stop blushing. She never sang for anyone. Not even Riley. They danced together, all the time, but Ellie never sang, not for an audience, not like this. She had always wanted to, but she was afraid Riley would make fun of her. Riley could sing beautifully. Ellie didn’t think she should try.

“Kiss,” Joel replied.

Ellie froze in place. Her knuckles went white as she gripped the broom. Her green eyes were wide.

“Wh-what?” she squeaked out.

“Kiss. That was the name of the band. Buncha guys painted up like evil clowns with these crazy big boots. They’re the ones who sang that song.”

“OH!” Ellie exclaimed, stunned, humiliated, flustered, overcorrecting, and laying it on too thick, trying vainly to cover up her ridiculous moment of wild hope, but only making things worse with each syllable. “I thought you meant… I mean… I thought… never mind… It was stupid. That was the name of the band? No kidding? Evil clowns? Man, that’s crazy. Did you ever see them play? Are you a fan? I kind of like them. I just know the one song though. But I kind of liked it. Good guitar, you know? Big boots? Really? –“

“Ellie,” Joel said gently, smiling without mockery. He had been a dad, even if she didn’t know it. He knew how fragile young girls could be. It made him feel all the more guilty for the way he had been looking at her lately. “Settle down. It’s alright.”

“Sorry.” She was blushing again. She held onto the broom and looked at the floor, feeling very stupid. She pulled both lips into her mouth and held them there so she wouldn’t embarrass herself further.

“You hungry, kiddo?” he asked innocently, helping to ease her past this moment.

“Always,” she said, her eyes on her shoes. Her face was very red.

“Dinner’s almost ready. We’ll eat and then we can take stock of our inventory.”

“Okay. Cool.”

He smiled. “And then we can start opening all these boxes and see what we’ve got. It’ll be like Christmas come early, okay?”

“Okay. Cool.”

“C’mon out, girl,” he said, stepping aside to make room for her in the grass behind the truck. “Let’s eat.”

“Okay,” she said, taking his hand and letting him help her to step down from the inside of the truck into the cool, autumn evening. “Cool.”

**. . .**

A full belly and two dozen packages to open took Ellie’s mind off the moment of embarrassment inside the truck. She dug around inside the last box of her half of the parcels giddly, displacing fistfuls of colorful styrofoam packing peanuts.

“Man! I love these things,” she said, holding up a big, pink, almost weightless peanut. “They look like the best candy ever!”

“Yeah,” Joel chuckled, prying open a round metal can of cookies, the contents of the last package on his side of the campfire. Twenty years old and fossilized, sadly. “But they _ain’t_ candy, Ellie.”

“Pfft,” she snarked. “I know that. I’m not dumb. Thanks, Joel.”

She had nibbled on a blue one earlier, when he wasn’t looking, just to be sure.

“Okay… So… What’s a ‘George Foreman Grill’?” she asked, pulling the box out of the brown shipping carton and holding it out for inspection.

“The manliest kitchen appliance ever made, girl.” Joel said, discarding the round drum of rock-hard cookies back into the old carton that he had pulled it from.

“Neat,” she said, taking a closer look at the box. “Too bad we don’t have electricity. This thing knocks out the fat, I see.”

“It sure did,” he said, settling back against the side of the truck. Cardboard boxes surrounded them. The flames of their campfire had been largely fueled by cardboard this evening. He smiled. “See? I told you this was gonna be like Christmas.”

She cutely scooted around the fire on her butt to sit closer to him, resting her back against the cool side of the UPS van next to him. “Never had this many boxes to open for Christmas, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah,” Joel said with a resigned shrug. “I reckon that’s the way of the world these days.”

“Never had very many Christmases, to be honest,” she sighed. She was full of hot food and the evening was turning cooler. She was suddenly sleepy.

“Sorry to hear that,” Joel yawned. He made no move to ease away from her, so she leaned in just a bit more, until her head was resting against his arm.

“Price of being an orphan,” she yawned in turn and then fixed her eyes on him, adoration adding even more beauty to the sunset glow on her face as she looked up at him. “You’re in a good mood tonight.”

“It’s been a good day, Red.” Joel said simply, reaching over to pat her leg lightly.

“Yeah,” she agreed and exhaled happily, settling back against the side of the van alongside him.

_Keep you hand right there, buddy. Don’t take it away._

Joel crossed his arms across his stomach.

_Damn._

“The bike’s runnin’ good again, Ellie. We got plenty of food and some new clothes. Still got plenty of ammo,” he said, closing his eyes as a cool breeze rolled over them. The hot, sticky days of Boston were far behind them now. “And we got across the Mississippi with no troubles. That’s the part I was really worried about.”

She looked over at him. “Oh yeah? You never said anything.”

“Didn’t want to worry you, girl.”

“Awww.” She poked him in the stomach playfully with one slim finger. “Look at you, taking care of me and stuff.”

“Yeah,” he said smugly. “That’s what I do.”

She giggled and eased just a bit closer to him, her eyes closed innocently. If she happened to brush her hip against his leg, it was a complete and honest accident.

They sat in silence for several minutes, enjoying the last rays of daylight together.

She shivered a little. “Brrr. Getting cold out here.”

“We’re into fall now. It won’t be gettin’ any warmer for a while, that’s for sure.”

She sighed and nuzzled into him, reasonably sure that he wouldn’t shove her away now. She turned her body slightly to make more of a pillow of his chest. She smiled and almost purred.

“Mmmmm. You’re comfy… and warm.”

“Thanks.” He yawned again. It had been a big day for both of them. “Did you find anything you liked in those boxes?”

“Couple of video games that looked pretty cool. But nothing to play them on. And no electricity. Some clothes that don’t fit. Some baby clothes and a big box of Huggies diapers,” she shrugged. “I might hang on to the Huggies. It’d be nice not to have to worry about going for a while. Just let the diapers handle it, you know?”

Joel barked a short laugh. “Oh God, kid. You are a mess.”

She grinned. “Just slip one of those bad boys on and let nature run its course while I worry about more important things.”

“Jesus,” he chuckled.

She smiled and stretched, using the motion to draw just a little closer to him. She was practically snuggled up to him now and he still wasn’t pushing her away. She smiled and, from behind closed eyelids, she dared to hope for more. She turned just a bit, slipping into the space between his left arm and his body, until she could rest her head under his jaw, against his collarbone and let her hand lie on his stomach as casually as possible.

“Man, that city was so fucking cool. Huh, Joel?”

“Yeah. It sure was. And it’s good to have some fresh supplies, I know that for a fact.”

“So many people. And so much to see. And that music in the diner. And that food. And candy! Fucking candy! Man. What a great fucking day. Thanks, dude.”

“Well,” Joel shrugged with a smirk, his big hand coming to rest on the small shoulder of the girl curled up against him, “I figured if I didn’t let you stop and do some shoppin’, I’d never hear the end of it. Didn’t want to listen to _that_ the whole way to Wyoming.”

“You made the right call, Joel,” Ellie giggled. He was holding her now, and she had to will her body not to vibrate from the excitement. She needed to pretend to be sleepy or else he might ask her to move. She yawned again, as cutely as she could manage.

His belt was only an inch from her hand, and his dick only a few inches further south from there. She tried not to think about it too much but she couldn’t quite manage it.

“Ugh,” she groaned. “All that riding was hard on my back.”

“Wait until you’re my age,” he chuckled, trying to ignore the sensation of her warm body, her soft breasts, pressing against him.

“Pssh. I’m not worried. That’s… what? Sixty years away? Eighty?”

He rumbled a low, affectionate laugh. “I’m gonna smack you in a minute.”

“Pbbbt!” She blew a raspberry up at him and grinned, her eyes half open. “Don’t be jealous because I’ve got youth on my side.”

Joel wanted to kiss her. He could see that she wanted to be kissed. He was certain of it. Young as she was, Ellie was still a woman and the signs were all there. She wanted him to kiss her. He idly mused about what a wonderful mistake it would be to give her what she obviously wanted.

She licked her lips, hoping she was reading this moment right. She scooted in, bringing her head just a little closer, just in case. She was sure she had almost caught him looking at her mouth when she had managed to pry her eyes away from his own lips. She prayed she was right and leaned in just a bit more, her nipples hard beneath her favorite red shirt, two sensitive points dragging exquisitely against his firm side as she drew closer.

A cold breeze blew across them but they didn’t notice.

Her lips were parted, Joel noticed; they were soft and pink and full. Her eyes were almost closed, her breathing quick and shallow, her face flush with excitement. He felt his cock stirring to life. Her nervous little hand was on his stomach, achingly close to it. She’d told him she’d never been kissed. He wasn’t too sure about that. She had a confidence about her in this moment, shaky though it was. She’d been in this moment at least once or twice before. But he was sure she wasn’t too experienced in this sort of stuff. She was trembling slightly against him. He could feel it and the heady mixture of her skittishness and determination excited him.

Ellie’s hand pulled against the fabric of his shirt, bunching it into her quivering little fist. She could feel the moment approaching. She was sure of it. He was going to kiss her.

_Come on, Joel._

Fuck, I ought not do this, he thought to himself.

She twisted her hips around just a bit, the length of her body pressed against him now as they sat against the side of the old truck, one thigh draped over his. She had no idea how close her leg was to the hard shape inside his jeans. She wanted to scoot up just a bit, to bring her face next to his, cheek to cheek. When she did, she was going to feel how hard she was. His hand on her shoulder pressed gently, arresting her movement.

“Ellie…“ Joel began, his voice husky, his eyelids heavy, his mind fighting to do the right thing by this girl before it was too late. “We better get this mess cleaned –“

“Do you like pineapple?” she blurted out, trying to save this moment but not knowing how, grasping wildly at the first thing that came to mind.

“What?”

“Pineapple,” she said in a rush, distracting him, keeping him from pushing her away, holding on to him tightly. His hand was firm on her shoulder, holding her in place, keeping her lips from getting too close. She craned her neck, bringing her face as near to his as she could. Almost, but not quite close enough. “I have a big can of it in my bag. I’ve been saving it for a special day.”

Her breath was warm on his face. He knew that if he inclined his head a little bit, he would be able to kiss this girl who was seemed determined to do that very same thing to him.

If she stretches her neck out any more, she’ll be a damn giraffe, he thought to himself.

Her mouth was open in anticipation, her eyes almost but not quite closed.

“Special day, huh?” he teased, leaning just a little closer, tormenting her.

“Yeah,” she whispered. “I stole it from that house where we got the truck from Bill.”

“Poor Bill,” Joel sighed, feigning sympathy. “You just robbed him blind, didn’t you?”

“Screw Bill,” Ellie grinned impishly. “He was mean to me. Besides, his fat ass didn’t need that pineapple anyway.”

“And after I promised poor Bill that you’d behave yourself,” Joel tisked, a wry smile on his face.

“Ugh. Why are we even talking about Bill? Jeez.” Ellie rolled her eyes, undaunted. “I was saving the can for a special occasion: when we got to the Fireflies… but today’s been pretty special… don’t you think?”

She was pushing gently but insistently against that damned hand, a fistful of his shirt in her hand, one slender leg levered over his, squirming slightly, almost trying to climb up him in slow motion. She was dying to kiss him; even a blind man could have seen that. She couldn’t hold the words back, and they slipped out in a half whisper.

“Joel… C’mon… let me…” Her high voice was soft, shaking.

”Ellie…” His voice was low, rumbling, cautioning, almost a animal growl.

“ _Please_ …”

_Oh God, tell me I didn’t make the wrong call here. I’ll die of shame if you don’t kiss me right now, Joel. I’ll fucking die, I swear I will._

Fuck it, he thought. It’s not like I wasn’t already going to hell.

He stopped holding her back and she eagerly slid up the last couple of inches to reach him. Their lips were so close that the whiskers of his beard brushed against her cheek. Her thigh was across his lap now. She could feel his hard member pressing against her leg. She was scared of it, but she wanted it too. It was foreign but familiar, alien but inviting. Somehow a dozen contesting sensations filled her at the same time. She craved it in a way that felt primal. If she’d ever had this effect on a man before, she didn’t know it, but she loved that she was making him aroused. She hoped he was even half as horny as she was.

“Oh man… You’re…” she breathed, looking down towards it, past her red shirt with the palm trees and the sunset, her nerve evaporating in that moment. “Oh _wow_ …”

She wanted to kiss him, but she’d lost her momentum, her certainty, overwhelmed by the implications of what she was about to do, of what she knew he wanted, what he was clearly expecting her to do, stuff she had thought she was ready for, stuff she had been thinking about almost non-stop for days and weeks now, stuff she was certain she was going to be absolutely awesome at… until she suddenly found herself about to cross through a doorway marked ‘adults only’. She remembered her health classes. She remembered all of Cherry Jackson’s smutty stories. He was erect… And that meant…

“Joel…” she whispered in a voice so thin and fragile and wobbly that she wasn’t sure he had even heard it. She bit her lower lip as she returned her gaze to his face. His eyes. His mouth.

He reached up and tucked her errant bangs behind her ear, leaving his hand there when he was done. She lowered her eyes shyly.

“I…” she sighed, trying to offer up some sort of weak excuse about being scared without actually saying she was scared because Eleanor Suzanne Williams was not sacred of something as simple as kissing and if she was trembling a little from head to toe, that’s only because it was getting cold like it always did in October and he was the one with a hard-on, not her, well, not that he could probably tell, at any rate, lady boners being incredibly discreet, after all. “… Um…”

The skin of his hand was rough but still somehow gentle on the side of her face. She sighed and nuzzled into it a little. His eyes were dark and she could feel herself being swallowed up in them. Her mouth was open and ready. Waiting.

“You gettin’ skittish on me, wild child?” he teased quietly, with a gentle understanding in his voice that she was grateful for.

“No,” she whispered. “ _Yes_. A little. You, um, probably think I’m being dumb, huh?”

“You ain’t dumb, Ellie,” he smiled, sending an electric thrill coursing through her.

He gently tilted her head a bit and she felt very small next to him, but in a good way. Everything about this moment felt good. She was still shaking, but she didn’t care. She loved this man. She trusted him. She knew he wouldn’t hurt her. She pressed her thigh against his cock, thrilled to feel how hard it was. She shivered and burned with desire. She held on to his shirt for dear life.

A delicate breeze brought orange and red leaves dancing down from the branches of the tree shading the old brown van.

He brushed his lips against hers. She held her breath.

They kissed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you that don’t have a bible handy, Matthew 24:21 reads “For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.” If you need a good quote about the end of the world and how much it’s going to suck donkey balls for all of us, you can’t do much better than the bible.
> 
> The song Ellie is singing in the van is “Crazy Nights” by Kiss. I’m not a big fan of those guys, to be honest, but my older sister loved them back in the day. For any members of the Kiss Army reading this, I should note that Ace Frehley, whom Joel identifies as the guitarist of Kiss, was no longer with the band when that song was released. It was Bruce Kulick who played on that song instead. I guess Joel’s knowledge of glam bands is somewhat incomplete. And in case you were wondering, that song was playing on the diner jukebox because it was actually available on vinyl 45 back in the day, like all the other songs I had playing on that jukebox. My older sister had a ton of 45's too. I kind of miss old formats for music. There was something nicely tactile about flipping through a record (or CD, in my case) collection, you know? Shit, I’m old. ;-)
> 
> Also, Joel and Ellie finally kissed. Just throwing that in there in case you missed it.
> 
> Drop by in a few days when Ellie and Joel do some more stuff that you might care to read about in Chapter Seventeen: Pineapples.


	17. Pineapples

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter seventeen is here at last. We pick up where we last left our heroes: in the middle of smooching. What happens next? More smooching, I suspect!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the lateness of this update, but I’m still logging loads and loads of overtime. I seriously doubt I’ll have an update ready for Saturday. But I have it on good authority that this crazy workload won’t last much longer. So let’s keep our fingers crossed that things get back to normal very soon.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 17 – Pineapples**

 

Riley had always said that kissing was like dancing. There was a rhythm to it. Someone led, someone followed. If you were the one following, all you had to do was keep up with the pace the other person set. Don’t get nervous and fall behind. Don’t be too eager and try to rush ahead. Just go with it. It was pretty much like dancing without music. Anyone could do it, even a stubby little white girl with two left feet.

The sudden recollection of Riley’s teasing words would have made Ellie smile if she weren’t so busy kissing Joel.

Riley had been a great kisser. Or so it had seemed to a goofy little dork with zero experience in that sort of thing. When Riley kissed her that last morning in Boston on the roof of the mall, the younger girl felt like she was melting into her older friend; adoring, freckled putty eager to be shaped and molded, ready and willing to be whatever Riley wanted.

Nervous little unkissed virgin that she was, Ellie had trembled noticeably the first time Riley had pulled her close and brought their lips together.

_We were bitten. It didn’t matter. It was still a perfect moment. A perfect kiss._

She was trembling now. Joel was a good kisser too.

_Oh God. This is perfect too. It’s not like kissing Riley at all, but it’s still amazing. Is this how men kiss? I guess it is. It’s great. Different. But great._

Her mind was swimming as she pressed herself against him; his big arms holding her tight; his cock hard and ready against her inner thigh; her pussy scalding her, a molten cauldron of long-held desire; her small, fine fingers clutching at him, holding him tightly, never wanting to let this man go; her eyes closed even though she wanted to open them; her cheeks flushed and blushing deeply; her lungs burning as she realized that she was still holding her breath.

_Idiot. Breathe. If you pass out he’ll think you’re the dumbest idiot ever._

_But don’t stop kissing! Let it out slow. But hurry. Everything’s getting fuzzy and I can hear my own heartbeat._

_Breathe. Use your nose. Get some air in. Don’t pass out._

She let it out through her nostrils, breathing through her nose so she could keep kissing, exactly like Riley had taught her to do. She made a sound as she did so. To her own ears, her wavering sigh sounded weak, needy, almost a whimper. To Joel’s ears, it was unspeakably erotic.

_Don’t make that sound! Grown women don’t make sounds like that! Act like a grown up!_

His beard was coarse but welcome against her face. His moustache prickled and tickled the skin around her mouth. The more they kissed, the more of those quavering, needy sounds she made.

_Oh fuck! I can’t stop making that sound! He’s gonna think I’m a scared little baby!_

She tried to stifle the sound in her throat, but somehow that only seemed to make it worse, louder, needier. He pulled her even more tightly to him. She eased her hips forward, savoring the feeling of the hard, warm thing against her leg.

_God! He’s so hard! He wants me! He wants to do it with me. So fucking cool. Scary. Cool. Both at the same time. Why isn’t there a word for that? Why can’t I stop making that sound? I have to stop! He’s not going to want me if I sound like a scared little kid. I have to –_

He eased their lips apart. She followed him with her mouth, trying to connect with him again.

“Oh God, Joel,” she gasped, breathless, shaking slightly. Her body was baking with lust.

_I’m wearing way too many clothes._

“Joel,” she repeated, her eyes almost but not quite closed, her cheeks red. “Shit! That was… _amazing_.”

“Ellie,” he said in a voice lower, huskier, sexier than she had ever heard before. “Maybe we ought not being doing this.”

“Yes we should!” she insisted, worming her way up him another vital inch, close enough to bring their lips together again. Her leg slid against his cock as she moved and he groaned slightly. Her eyes sparkled, moist with unshed tears. She was sure she would start to cry at any moment and she wasn’t sure why. “We should do this, Joel. We should keep doing this. Like, _all the time_. Okay?”

“You’re fourteen, Ellie,” he said, his thick fingers easing her ponytail aside to expose her neck.

“Fourteen and a half,” she corrected, her voice soft and husky with lust. “It’s October. I’ll be fifteen in February, so it’s cool. It’s cool, Joel. I swear it is.”

“I just don’t want you thinkin’ I…” he sighed, searching for the right word.

“It’s cool. _Really_ ,” she whispered, her lips at the edge of his mouth as she spoke, every puff of hot air of every syllable playing across his teeth. “I’ve wanted to do this for ages, Joel.”

“Ages, huh?” he smirked, making her want to smack him for being so damn cocky.

“Don’t be a butt,” she groaned, wriggling delightfully against him, loving the feeling of being held by him.

_I’m your prisoner, Joel. C’mon. Can’t you see that? Don’t make me say it._

One of his hands drifted down her back. Her breath caught in her throat at the wonderful, electric sensations that arced through her.

“Oh God,” she groaned softly.

His big hand slid across her ass, cupping one cheek, resting there. Inside her sneakers, her toes curled involuntarily.

_Spank me, Joel._

“Kiss me, Joel.”

The words were softer and quieter than the gentle evening breeze, but he heard them. His lips found hers again.

The leaves fell around them. The seasons changed. The stars spun in the sky, a timeless waltz of constellations twirling and pirouetting across the immutable backdrop of the night, oblivious or indifferent to the slow motion tragedy of life. Mountains rose and fell as they kissed. The world that was crumbled away, concrete and steel evaporating like morning dew as eons flew by like mere seconds, leaving behind tall, healing grass that filled in the gaps and scars that Man had left as his legacy in a world that had turned against him in the end, like it did with everything that breathed and loved and lived. Dinosaurs returned to the world, stomping across the final, primal plains of a world fading into darkness as the angry red sun ran out of fuel. The moon swung around the earth, slipping a little further away each year. At last, it escaped into space and left the graying, ashen world behind. And still they kissed. The stars began to dim and wink out, one by one, like the lights she remembered from that dream about Riley, the really strange one with all the nakedness and the french-fries and the leather boots and the big hoop earrings and the shared cocksucking in the backseat of Joel’s sweet Camaro as they worked together, best friends till the end, to draw the cum out of his big, gorgeous, hard, throbbing –

He parted their lips again and she groaned.

“Jesus… so fucking cool…”

She felt his lips on her forehead and she felt her body shudder against him. She exhaled against his neck.

“So… fucking coooool…”

He chuckled and it reverberated against her. She smiled, her eyes still closed. A million billion trillion years had gone by and she didn’t want to see how much the world had changed. It was just like the guy in that comic she had read. The scary comic about the guy with the teleporter that broke and moved him in time instead. He was all alone, the poor guy, with nothing but ruins of the world he had known. There were ruins in the real world too, but she had never know the world before it all fell apart. And she wasn’t alone, like that poor guy. She had Joel. He was holding her. She wasn’t alone.

She rested her head against him as she snuggled closer. His cock was still hard against her.

_He wants to put that in me._

_I think I want that too._

_Oh man. I hope it doesn’t hurt too much. Riley said it kind of hurts the first time. Cherry said that too. And Cherry would know if anyone would._

He gently tucked her bangs behind her ear again. His fingertips lightly stroked the ridge of her ear, working their way around and down, until he was gently tugging her earlobe.

_You won’t hurt me, Joel. I know you won’t._

“You goin’ to sleep on me, Red?”

“No,” she sighed, her eyes still closed. “Just enjoying the moment.”

“Moment’s all we got these days,” he agreed, squeezing her shoulder reassuringly.

“Mmm-hmmm,” she murmured. She hugged him tighter.

_Damn. He took his hand off my butt._

_Shit. This would be a perfect moment if it weren’t for that._

His hand left her ear and she felt it sliding across her back, just below her bra.

_Oh man. He’s still hard. Does it hurt if it stays hard too long? That’s what Montego told Riley. I don’t want him hurting. Riley took care of her boyfriend. Maybe I should…I mean, I can… do… something for him. Right?_

She looked up at him, opening her eyes at last. The world was just as she had left it. No dinosaurs. No plains of ash. The stars were still in the sky, just beginning to emerge in the navy blue above the dark red band of the late sunset.

“Does that hurt?” she asked.

“Does what hurt?”

She gingerly pressed her leg against his aching member. He exhaled in a way that was very pleasing to her ears.

“That,” she said with innocent sincerity. “You know… ‘Little Joel’. Does it hurt?”

He laughed gently and kissed her cheek. “No, girl. It doesn’t hurt.”

She turned her head slightly, hoping for a kiss on the mouth instead. None came.

“Are you sure? It’s been hard a long time now.”

“No, Ellie. It doesn’t hurt. That’s not how these things work.”

_Fuck you, Montego! You big liar! Ugh! What an asshole!_

He kissed her cheek again, and she opened her mouth with an erotic groan, clearly hoping again for a more intimate kiss. He whispered into her mouth as she licked her lips. “Some boy tell you that, Ellie?”

“I’ve heard boys say that, yeah,” she said, her lips tantalizingly close to his, a little embarrassed about her inexperience but trying hard to be cool, the way a woman would. “No boy ever said it to _me_. But a girl hears things, you know?”

“I don’t doubt it,” Joel said, his beard wonderfully scratchy against her cheek as he held her close and she tucked her face into the hollow of his neck. “Boys say all kinds of things to pretty girls like you. But you gotta be careful. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.”

_He called me pretty. Awesome._

“You think I’m pretty?” she asked, hugging him tight, pressing her face into his neck, her cheeks blushing again, grinning broadly, her white teeth gleaming.

“You sure are, Ellie,” he said in a deep, low husk. “Hell, you’re gorgeous, girl.”

_Score!_

Her body continued to warm but she was no longer trembling.

_Fuck, I’m hot. These clothes have got to come off._

“Umm…” she began, trying to find the right approach. “Can I… um… Can I sleep in one of your shirts tonight?”

“Sure,” he said. “Only clean one I’ve got is the one I bought at the market today.”

“Oh. That’s okay then. I don’t want to dirty up your last shirt.”

“I don’t mind, girl. You can wear it tonight and I’ll put it on tomorrow.”

“Thank you,” she cooed sweetly, snuggling against him with a contented sigh. “I promise I won’t drool all over the sleeves.”

“Don’t go makin’ promises you can’t keep,” he chuckled.

“Oooh,” she moaned with mock disdain. “You big dick.”

He chuckled. “You know somethin’ about that now, I reckon.”

She wiggled against him affectionately, snickering. “Look at you, Joel! Was that a pun?”

“It’s a fact,” he replied, planting a small kiss on the crown of her head.

“So…” she said, looking up at him, her eyes sly. “Can… Can I touch it?”

He shook his head slightly. “That’s probably a little too far down this road tonight.”

“Please?” she purred, her small hand already sliding down his flank, lower and lower. She slid her hips to the side, getting her leg out of the way.

“Ellie.” Cautioning. But lusty too. On the fence. Wanting it. But knowing better.

“Pleeeasseee?” she whispered in a devilish, breathy voice. Her eyes never left his. Her hand was almost there.

His hand was suddenly around her wrist, halting her mere inches from her goal.

_Shit. So close._

“No, Ellie,” he warned. “That’s too much tonight.”

“Tomorrow then? Or soon? Please?” she cooed.

She struggled a little in his grasp, thrilling at how strong he was, loving the feeling of being restrained by him, corrected by him… hoping to be punished by him.

“Pretty please?” she purred.

“One thing at a time, girl.” His voice was firm. This wasn’t negotiable. “There’s no rush.”

_Yes, there is. Riley thought she had plenty of time. I bet Tess did too._

He spoke against her temple, his whiskers dancing against her skin, stoking the fire in her belly. “Just hold your horses a little while, all right?”

“But I want to hold _your_ horse,” she giggled. Everybody loved puns.

“Behave yourself, kiddo.”

“Are you gonna spank me if I don’t?” she whispered in nervous, almost timid voice. She shivered when she spoke and Joel didn’t fail to notice. She bit her lower lip but forced herself to maintain eye contact. He had to know. She _needed_ him to know.

_Spank me, Joel. I want you to._

“I just might, you little brat,” he chuckled and brought her in for another kiss. She whimpered and melted against him. He cock ached painfully, screaming for release. He tried to ignore it, but it wasn’t easy. It hurt.

Above her, the stars whirled across the sky again and a million years flew by as she lay against him, safe in his arms, breathing through her nose like a pro and moving slowly under his guidance into the world of adults.

**. . .**

The baking soda was taking the taste of him out of her mouth and she hated it. She wanted to taste his kisses forever. She scrubbed the toothbrush across the enamel, her water bottle in her other hand, as she watched him breaking down all the cardboard boxes and folding them flat before stacking them into a pile by the rear door of the UPS van.

“Foh seepehn ohn?” she asked, forming words around the toothbrush.

“Yeah,” he said, his back to her as he worked. “The metal floor of that van’d suck all the heat out of our bodies if we don’t get somethin’ between us and it.”

_Not my body, dude. I’m boiling under these clothes. All that kissing has got me warmer than the radiator in my old dorm room._

“Cooh,” she said and spit out the white froth into the tall grass.

The light of day was almost gone. It would be very dark soon. The moon had been full a few nights ago. It was still big and fat in the sky tonight. She hated moonless nights. She swished the water around in her mouth before spitting it out too.

“Gonna be dark in a few minutes,” she said, kneeling down to pack her kit away.

“Yep,” he said. “Here. Give me a hand spreading this stuff out, okay?”

“Sure thing, boss.”

They covered the floor of the van with the cardboard as best they could. There was enough for a thin layer, enough to hide the chilling metal, but not enough to make a comfortable pad to sleep on.

“We’d better spread out some of our clothes too,” Joel said. “We need to make a thick pad as we can to help retain some heat.”

“Okay.”

T-shirts, jeans, towels. Arranged sensibly, it made for a decent enough mattress. The inside of the van now smelled like a bag of dirty laundry, unfortunately.

Joel handed her his new brown flannel shirt. “Here. Get this on. We can use the clothes you’re wearin’ for the pad.”

“Okay,” she said, taking it in a hand that was suddenly shaking. She blushed and wished she didn’t. She began to untuck her shirt from her denim jeans.

“I’ll go put the camo net over the bike,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, grateful for the offer of privacy, wishing she were bolder.

He went to the Honda, parked on the far side of the tree, just out of sight from where she stood. Quickly she shimmied out of her Levis and pulled both her shirts over her head. She stood for a moment in the chilly air, wearing only her underwear.

_Oh fuck. What do I do? Do I take my underwear off too?_

_He’s gonna want to do it, right?_

_Sure, boo. He’s a guy. He had a hard-on. I’m pretty sure he still sorta has one._

_I’ve been sleeping with no underwear a lot lately. Kind of hoping he’d notice._

_He noticed, boo._

_But it’s different now. This is all different now. He’s gonna want to do it. So I shouldn’t wear any panties, right?_

_But if I’m not wearing panties, will he think I’m easy? Or that I’m too ready for it? I don’t want him thinking I’m cheap or something. Riley said boys thought Cherry was cheap and that’s why they didn’t respect her._

_I want him to respect me._

_But I want him to fuck me too. At least, I think I do. No, I do! I want him to! I’m ready._

_At least, I think I’m ready._

_Oh fuck. What do I do?_

Joel rounded the corner of the van and found her standing there, wide-eyed, her mouth open, wordlessly. Black sports bra. Red panties. White socks. Bare skin. Flat stomach. Firm thighs. Graceful neck. Red hair undone and loose. Tiny waist above round, ripening hips. Her mouth moved. No words. Just a squeaking noise.

“Shit! I’m sorry, Ellie,” Joel said, shielding his eyes, turning on his heel, going back the way he came. “I figured you were dressed by now. Shit. I shoulda asked.”

He was gone, out of sight, on the far side of the van again.

_He looked at me. He saw me. I’m in my fucking underwear._

“Tell me when you’re ready,” he said from the darkness.

_He saw me in my underwear._

_Oh shit._

_I’m… Oh God, I’m so horny now._

She gulped some cool night air into her lungs.

_What the fuck do I do? He saw me! And I was practically naked! Oh fuck! What do I do?_

She roughly shoved her panties down her legs, stepping out of them quickly as she unhooked her bra. She shook out the shirt, unbuttoning it with nimble but nervous fingers.

_Get undressed! Hurry hurry hurry! Before he comes back!_

A crazy thought made her freeze like a statue carved in the shape of a naked virginal teenager, the brown flannel hanging limply from her hands. She held her breath as the notion burst into her mind.

_Tell him you’re ready, boo._

_But I’m still naked._

_Tell him, boo. Say “I’m ready, Joel. Come on out.”_

_Oh man. I’m naked._

_Tell him you’re ready. He’ll come around the corner again and he’ll see you naked._

_Oh man. Oh fuck._

_Let him see you naked, boo._

_Oh fuck._

_He wants to see you naked. Let him._

_Fuck._

_You want him to see you naked. Show him what you’ve got, girl._

_Fu-_

_He’ll see you, all naked and sexy and stuff, and he won’t be able to stop himself, boo. He’ll lay you down right here in the grass and bang you good and hard. All night. You want to give it up to him, don’t you? So do it. Let him bang you, girl._

_F-_

_Do it, boo._

_…_

_Do it._

Joel stood in the darkness, his arms crossed, his dick straining against the front of his pants, screaming at him to hurry up and fuck this girl already.

He tried to recall his words from earlier, when he had admonished her not to rush things.

But she had looked so fucking sexy in her underwear, her pale skin standing out against the darkening field, lit only by her flashlight lying on the bumper of the van. Almost naked as she had been, and without the comics or the joke books, she had looked older, not like a teenager, but like a woman ready for something more than kissing.

But she had looked scared too. Just a little. Just enough to turn him on in a way that he found shameful, no matter that it made him as hard as he had been when he was teenager too.

She wanted to be fucked, but she was scared of it too, he could see that easily enough. She was a virgin, no doubt about it.

“J-joel…” Her voice came to him from the other side of the van, unsteady but warm, desirous but shy. “I… I’m ready.”

His cock grew harder, painfully so, at her words.

“Alright,” he said at length, forcing himself to wait a moment, until his head was in the right place, until his erection began to soften a little, and the fire in his blood began to cool.

He took a deep breath, counted to five, and walked around the edge of the brown truck.

Ellie was waiting there for him, smiling bashfully, apprehensive, fingers twined together, standing slightly pigeon-toed, her lower lip sucked into her plump, sensual mouth, her whole body radiating with young, uncertain lust.

She was wearing his new shirt.

**. . .**

“Shit!” she exclaimed, unfolding her old green wool blanket, “we shoulda ate the pineapples before we brushed our teeth.”

“Can’t believe you’ve been carrying a can of pineapples all the way from Lincoln,” Joel said, unrolling his sleeping bag, the girl standing just a few inches away in the cramped confines of the old van’s center aisle. “Holdin’ out on me like that. Not the sort of thing I’d expect from a sidekick.”

“Shut up,” Ellie giggled, swatting his shin playfully with the side of her socked foot.

“I don’t know, girl,” Joel groused affectionately. “Betcha Batman never put up with that kind of stuff from Robin.”

“ _Robin?_ Pfft. I’ve been promoted to Batgirl,” Ellie grinned, her arms crossed, cutely defiant, her fingertips barely sticking out of the long, rolled-up sleeves as she stood atop her green blanket. “I’m more of a partner now than a sidekick, buddy.”

“There you go again. Gettin’ mighty uppity for a sidekick,” Joel said, straightening up, his sleeping bag ready for use, his back aching after too many days on the Honda. “Might have to go back to Burlington. See if what they have in stock in one of the sidekick stores. Maybe trade you in and get myself a new one.”

Ellie quirked her lips and stuck her tongue out at him.

“Or maybe a used one,” he said, his eyes kind but teasing in the illumination of their flashlights, resting on shelves. “I reckon a used sidekick would be just as good. Save me a little money too.”

“Oh fuck you! I’m practically brand new and you know it,” she blushed, grinning, her eyes shy, her fingertip poking him in the ribs, challenging him. He could take her words any way he wanted to. She suddenly wanted him to pull her down playfully, squealing in delight for him, eager to be pinned by him… kissed by him… covered by him…

“I reckon it’s too late to go back to town anyway,” Joel shrugged. “Might as well just turn in. Maybe I’ll trade you in tomorrow. Maybe not. No point in worryin’ about it at bedtime, right?”

“Right,” Ellie said, dropping down to her knees effortlessly, in a way that made Joel’s older knees wince. Her borrowed shirt fluttered up a little as she did, giving him a glimpse of her round, smooth, naked backside.

She ain’t wearing any underwear again, he thought to himself with no small measure of guilt over the way his heart almost skipped a beat as he glimpsed her bare ass. Damn it, Ellie. If you had any idea what the sight of you like that does to me.

She was on all fours now, which sent his mind in new, more shameful directions, as she arranged her backpack to be her pillow. She glanced back over her shoulder to speak to him and he only barely managed to move his eyes away from her half-covered ass in time.

“Brrrr,” she said, shivering a little for show. “Gonna be cold tonight.”

“Reckon you’re right, girl,” Joel said, stepping away, his hard cock jutting prominently against his jeans. There was no hiding it and no point in trying. “Why don’t you get in my sleepin’ bag, Ellie?”

Ellie froze, her eyes wide. Her succulent mouth opened a little, trying to form a word, but her brain had forgotten how to speak.

“Go on now,” he said, hard and tall and sexy, the most masculine thing she had ever seen in her young life. “Get in there. You’ll be warm tonight.”

She did as she was told, eagerly crawling over to it and hurrying to get inside. Her fingers were nervous, clumsy. Working the long zipper on the side of the bag wasn’t easy. She cursed softly. Why wouldn’t her hands stop shaking? Why did she have to look like a stupid, butterfingered kid at a time like this?

He knelt down next to her and she realized she was shaking.

“Lemme give you a hand, Ellie,” he said with a deep, gentle voice that resonated through her whole body, nose to toes.

“‘Kay,” she whispered. It was the only word she could manage.

With one hand on her lower back, he reached across her with the other to help her with the zipper. His body, so close to hers, was warm and strong. She turned her hips just a little, enough to bring them against him, the motion tugging her borrowed shirt up just a little more. She could feel the cold night air on her bottom, chilly invisible fingers reaching underneath, a cold sensation ready to stroke her hot pussy.

A long, shuddering exhalation slipped from her parted lips.

“Here you go,” Joel said, his hand still over hers, both of them, girl and man, holding the big zipper together. “Get on in.”

She did. If the flannel shirt got twisted around her waist as she scooted into the bag, if a soft tangle of glossy red curls was visible to him as she slid inside, if she was blushing from head to toe all the while, it was surely an honest mistake. Surely.

Ellie wormed her way to the side of the warm enclosure, making room for him inside the bag with her. She smiled adoringly, her eyes filled with promises for him.

“Gonna be crowded in here,” she squeaked, wanting for all the world to have been able to speak those words in a sexy purr instead of sounding like a scared kid. “Um… Cozy, I meant to say.”

“You’re the one sleepin’ in the bag tonight, kiddo. Not me,” Joel said, zipping her in, snug and safe, doing all he could not to laugh at the almost comic way her lovely features fell into wide-eyed despair as she realized what was happening. He knew now was not the time to tease her. She loved jokes, this girl, but not ones at her expense, and not now, not at a time like this.

Her voice caught in her throat, a faint, high-pitched half-cough. “W-what?”

“I’ll be sleepin’ under this old blanket of yours. Hush now,” he said as she started to protest. “Since you just love sleepin’ half nekkid, I figure it’s best to let you have the sleepin’ bag now that we’ve got these cold fall nights sneakin’ up on us.”

“But… Don’t you want to?” she whispered plaintively. “Don’t you want…?”

‘Me’, her eyes said.

The beginnings of tears glistened in the corners of those lovely green eyes. Her lips trembled, her mouth open. Afraid. Needy. Worried. Craving. Confused. In love.

“Don’t want you catchin’ a cold, kiddo.” He winked and bent low, bringing his face close to hers, silencing her with sheer anticipation. “Besides, I ain’t had a bath in a week. You don’t need me stinkin’ you up all night.

“But Joel…”

“No buts, girl. Now do you want your goodnight kiss…?”

Her eyes stared into his. Her mouth opened. The pink tip of her tongue crested the white ridge of her teeth. Her eyelids slid down to cover most of her eyes. These things happened by reflex, without conscious choice on her part.

He husked, his breath tickling her cheek. “Or are you gonna keep talkin’ all night?”

She started to smile, elated at how easily he teased her, how comfortable he was with her now, such a far cry from how he had kept her at a distance when they had first met. His lips touched hers and she rose to meet him, pressing their mouths together with wild, youthful exuberance. She sighed contentedly, rapturously, and slid a hand around his neck. She wanted to pull him down to her, to drag him into the sleeping bag, to make love to him. She wanted so much from him.

She wanted him to stay with her forever.

**. . .**

Joel lay in the pitch black of the van’s interior, fully clothed and warm enough under the girl’s thin blanket. His back ached and his body was tired. His smoldering cock scolded him for letting an easy seduction slip away so foolishly.

I shouldn’t have kissed her, he thought. What the hell was I thinking? She’s just a kid.

Well, mostly still a kid.

Nowhere near old enough, that’s for damn sure.

Just because we finally had a good day… got the bike fixed… had a good hot meal in our bellies and more supplies in our packs than we can use up for a good long while… I got stupid, I guess… And then I had to go and kiss you.

Fuck. I got careless. Careless and stupid and now I’ve gone and done something I shouldn’t have. I slipped up and opened a door that you ain’t never gonna let me close.

He sighed heavily and rolled over onto his side, away from her.

Gotta get you to Tommy’s, he decided with an unhappy certainty. Get you to my brother and make you his problem before I do something even more stupid than what I’ve done today.

You ain’t gonna like it, Ellie. But it’s the best thing for you. I know you’ll understand when you’re older.

And by then I’ll be long gone.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Ellie. She just loves Joel so much. She trusts him in that way that you can when you’re young and in love and never suspect that your true love would betray you.
> 
> Poor Joel. Trying so hard to do the right thing and failing at it. Selfish but decent, all at the same time. His attempt to put things right when he gets Ellie to Jackson will only make things worse.
> 
> Poor reader, promised a regular schedule of updates and look at how that’s turned out. (Sorry). 
> 
> Tune in again (next week, I think) to see what our heroes do when they find they’re out of clean clothes and have a need to get squeaky clean in Chapter Eighteen: The All-Day Bath.


	18. The All-Day Bath (I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With nothing clean to wear, Joel and Ellie stop to do laundry and have a nice long bath… so long in fact, that it will take three chapters to describe it all. Here’s part one. Enjoy!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies again for letting my update schedule fall apart. I’m still working crazy hours, but I’m pretty sure that this disruption will be coming to an end soon. With any luck, I’ll have this thing back on track very soon.
> 
> And thanks to everyone who left a comment recently. It's pretty late here and I'm pooped. When I get up tomorrow, I'll make the time to sit down and read/reply to all of them. :-)

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 18 – The All-Day Bath**   
**(Part One)**

 

The farmhouse at the edge of the field was old, ramshackle and silent. The creek behind it was cold, fast flowing and melodic.

“Ffffffuuuuckk,” Ellie chattered, knee deep in the stream, washing her laundry as fast as she could. “You didn’t tell me the water was this cold, Joel.”

“Yes, I did,” Joel chuckled, the Winchester rifle cradled across his chest as he stood guard.

“You didn’t tell me it was _this_ cold,” Ellie grumbled, soaping her favorite red shirt, trying to make twenty year old cotton clean again without fraying or tearing the garment.

“I said it was cold enough to freeze my nuts off,” Joel said, looking back at her, hoping to catch her eye, wanting to tease her a bit. “That’s a pretty fair assessment of that water, I reckon.”

“I reckon my nuts are about froze off then,” Ellie groused, stooping to dunk the shirt in the water.

Swishing it around splashed even more unpleasantly cold water across her bare thighs. She was wearing her gray tank top and shorts. They were dirty too and would be the last things to be washed today. She shivered again and wrung the shirt out.

“Seriously, Joel,” she lamented, sloshing out of the creek to lay her shirt out on the bank to dry, “I think my balls are all the way up in my body now. What if they don’t drop down again? What will I do?”

“Jesus, girl,” Joel said with a shake of his head. “The things you say.”

She stopped near him on her way back to the creek, looking up at him slyly.

“Will you still keep me around if my balls get stuck up there?”

“Ellie.” His tone was cautioning but a smile flickered at the edge of his mouth. He did not look at her.

“Will you help me look for them?” she cooed, leaning in close. “I’ll let you borrow my flashlight.”

He chuckled. “Stop stalling and take your bath already.”

She whined sweetly. “But it’s so _fucking cold!_ ”

“Ain’t gonna get any warmer, girl. And we aint leavin’ till you’ve had a bath.”

She recoiled with a gasp. “Is this just an excuse for me to get naked?! Joel Miller! I’m speechless.”

Joel snorted. “You’ve never been speechless a day in your life.”

“Oh! Fuck you!” She socked him lightly in the arm and made her way back to the edge of the creek, her towel folded under her arm, a bar of soap, a washcloth, and her pistol tucked safely inside it.

“Hurry up and take your bath, kiddo.”

“So you’re saying I stink,” she grumped affectionately. “Well, thanks a bunch, Joel.”

She pulled her tank top over her head and shivered as the cold breeze tickled her breasts.

“Fuck!” She hugged herself momentarily. “I miss summer!”

“Get undressed and get in the water, Ellie,” Joel said from his spot on the top of the bank.

“Man! You can’t wait to peek can you? Damn, Joel!” she giggled, turning to look at his back, her breasts bare and defiantly uncovered, almost daring him to look.

“I’m not peekin’, Ellie.”

“Why not?” she giggled. “I’m naked over here! You’re missing the show, dude!”

Joel laughed but did not turn around. She stepped out of her shorts. She was naked now. The wind caressed her. She shivered.

_Turn around, Joel. Look at me._

_See me._

She swallowed hard.

“Joel…” she began.

“Yeah?” Still not looking at her.

“I… I won’t tell anyone if you peek.”

The wind danced and swirled around her. She trembled, and not just from the cold.

“It’s ain’t peekin’ if you _know_ I’m lookin’, girl,” he said in a sexy, smug drawl without turning his head.

She cackled and squealed and dashed for the water.

She didn’t see him looking at her ass as she ran.

**. . .**

He had rigged up a clothesline between two trees near the rotting farmhouse. While she bathed, he had gathered up her wet clothes and carried them to the line to hang them up. As he knelt on the edge of the bank, collecting her things, she had squatted down in the water, submerging herself to her chin with a loud squeak. The water was icy cold but she did it anyway. She hated that she hid, scolding herself for not being braver, but when he had announced he was turning around to get her stuff, she had dropped down into the concealment of the water by reflex. Suddenly the thought of him seeing her naked had frightened her. She had wanted to show herself to him eagerly just a few minutes before, but now she felt little and soaked and decidedly unsexy.

She watched him go from where she crouched just a few feet from shore, cold water rushing around her, chilling her slim body until she shook.

_Why am I such a big wuss? Fuck! Riley wouldn’t have done this! She wouldn’t have hid like a scaredy cat! She would have let Joel see her. She wouldn’t have cared! Why can’t I be more like Riley? Or Tess?_

_Because Riley had big tits! And Tess had even bigger tits! And what have I got? Practically nothing! Fuck! It’s not fair!_

She stood up, the combination of water running down her body and the wind gliding across her skin drawing a shuddering groan from her. The soap was a cube of ice in her hand. The washcloth brought a thousand stinging needles everywhere it touched her flesh.

_Jesus, it’s cold!_

_Maybe it’ll stay cold and we’ll have to share the sleeping bag tonight._

_Once it gets dark, and we’ve got a nice campfire… or if we can find someplace indoors… maybe then I’ll work up the nerve to let him see me naked._

_Maybe… I hope._

_If I can just stop being a big baby about this._

“You’re gonna need an ice pick to chisel me out of this water, Joel!” she called to him, challengingly, boldly, faking a bravery she didn’t entirely feel.

“If you stay in there all day, I just might,” he called back from the distant clothesline. He didn’t look back at her but instead kept his attention carefully focused on the laundry he was draping over the blue nylon rope.

_He wants to see me naked, right?_

_Man. I hope he does._

He was far enough away that she could hold her hand out and cover him with her thumb. If he sneaked a peek from that distance, would he even be able to see anything? Probably not.

_What if he doesn’t? What if I’m too scrawny or something? Maybe he doesn’t want -_

_No, that’s dumb. Of course he wants to. Guys love to look at naked girls. Even I know that. Riley told me that when she and Montego snuck into that old apartment with the mattress and all the names on the wall, he asked her to take off her clothes and just stand there while he looked at her for a while. She said she felt goofy doing it but Montego really, really enjoyed it._

_Man… Could I just stand there… and let Joel look at me…_

_Maybe. Probably. I know I’d like to try._

She shivered and squatted down to dunk her head in the water. She had forgotten to bring one of the little Motel 6 bottles of shampoo. Soap would have to do. Marching naked across the grass and past Joel to get the shampoo out of her pack by the Honda was a plan too terrifying to contemplate. Maybe if her boobs were bigger or her legs longer like Tess… or if her butt were big and juicy like Riley’s… but she didn’t look like them. She was short and skinny and not confident about her curves yet.

She began to lather her hair and tried to reassure herself again as she did.

_Joel’s a guy. Don’t worry. He wants to see you naked._

_Those fuckers at Fort Overpass. They were guys. They called you a slut. They probably wanted to see you naked too._

She shuddered.

_Gross._

_But it’s different with Joel. I want him to see me. I hope he wants to see me._

_Joel wants to see you naked, boo. Trust me._

She smiled and dunked her head to rinse.

Cold as the water was, there was something wonderful about it as well. For one long moment, as she swirled her head around under the surface, the world was shut out, replaced with an oddly relaxing roar, a rush of sound that drove everything else out. Ellie had only ever known lukewarm showers, a low-pressure drizzle that usually oozed and dripped the dirt away rather than sent it rushing from her skin. The feeling of fast moving, cleansing water was still a novel thing to her, and the sensation of immersing her head was foreign but fun, even if this particular water was way too damn cold to be pleasant.

Bent sharply at the waist, squatting in the flowing creek, holding her breath, a few air bubbles slipping from her upside down nostrils. Ellie smiled. Bathing naked in a wilderness creek like Huckleberry Finn. Not bad for a girl who thought she’d never leave the rusting containment walls of Boston.

Thump.

She wasn’t sure she had heard it. The roar of the water around her ears almost swallowed up the sound.

Thump. Thump.

She straightened up, stood up, the creek swirling around her hips, the water pouring down her body so chilled by the air that she gasped for breath. Her red hair was plastered over her face like a gleaming crimson veil.

Bang! Bang!

She blew the water away from her mouth and nose as she frantically pushed her hair away with her fingers. Her hands were shaking. The sharp report of the Winchester rifle was unmistakable.

“Oh fuck,” she whispered to herself. A moment ago, being naked was exciting and sort of sexy. Now she felt helpless and vulnerable. This was no longer the good kind of naked.

She tried to blink the damned torrent of water streaming from her head away from her eyes as she held her hair away from her face with trembling fingers. More gunshots. A distant screech, a parody of human sounds.

“Infected!” she hissed. Her blood ran as cold as the water around her.

Bang!

Her clothes were on the grassy bank, her towel next to them, her pistol resting on the towel. She began to push through the hip-deep water, fording her way to shore.

_Gun! Get the gun! Get the gun, get dressed, and help him!_

Ellie could see Joel, still by the old farmhouse and the Honda, the rifle in his hands belching smoke and flame, a dozen or more infected making their way towards him, a mix of runners and clickers, dirty inhuman things emerging from the forest on the far side of the gravel road across from the rotting house. As he fired, even more came lurching from the tree line. Five more. Ten. Maybe twenty now, with more following behind. They seemed without number.

_Oh God… Oh no…_

**Click… Click Click…**

Close. Very close. Just up the bank, from the sound of it. Ellie darted backwards into the water, squatting down, hoping to hide. The infected seemed to avoid water for the most part. Like her, they couldn’t swim. She hoped it wouldn’t be able to detect her, but she was unsure if water reflected sound well or not.

The split, ruined face of the clicker appeared first, cresting the peak of the little grassy hill overlooking the creek. Encased in filthy clothes, covered with dirt and scabs, veins bulging around pockets of the infection. The nametag on the ratty blue polo shirt it wore read ‘Joey’ and the rusting fastening pin on the back had torn a long gouge in the fabric, revealing more corrupted flesh beneath. How the plastic tag had remained attached by its little flapping bit of blue cloth was a mystery as unsolvable to her as the meaning of the yellow ‘Best Buy’ logo emblazoned on the shirt.

Another rifle shot. The thing that had been Joey swiveled its bifurcated face away from her and the noisy water, considering the sound it had heard. The farmhouse up on the hill was almost certainly too far away for the clicker to detect, but the report of the Winchester was loud and intriguing. With a dry, rasping bellow, the monster began to make its way through the grass, in the general direction of the rotted old house and Joel.

_Oh fuck. This is bad._

Ellie began to creep out of the water again. She could see a dozen dead infected scattered around the field across from the house. Joel was reloading the rifle. Forty or more infected were on the move through the tall grass and towards the partially intact gravel road that separated the house from the field. The creek she was in ran behind the old farmhouse, more or less parallel with the fading remnants of the back road, flowing south towards US-34 a few miles away. She couldn’t see the road closest to the creek. It was hidden atop the hill above the creek, tucked away out of sight. She didn’t see the runner until it screamed in agonized excitement at the sight of naked, shivering, helpless prey, still knee deep in water and beyond the reach of clothing or weapons.

“OH FUCK!” Ellie screamed, backpedaling into the water, empty-handed.

The runner barreled down the hill awkwardly in that poorly controlled fashion of the newly infected, stumbling and tripping, rolling the last few feet to the shore, almost on top of Ellie’s discarded clothes. It was up quickly, levering itself to its feet in a way no human would. It made Ellie’s shoulders and spine wince in sympathy.

She was already out as far from the shore as she dared, the cold water up to her ribs. Any further out and she knew she’d be swimming… drowning.

She also knew runner’s eyesight were generally pretty poor unless they were newly infected.

_The eyes are the first thing to go._

She swallowed her fear and bent low, ignoring the cold, until everything below her eyes and nose were submerged.

_I am a rock. I’m a rock in the water and I’m not even worth looking at._

The thing wore olive drab fatigues with a black tactical vest over the jacket. The holster on the belt was empty, the pistol it had held long gone, but a single magazine of ammunition was in one of the ammo pouches on the belt. The other pouches were empty. A large canteen swung uselessly across its chest, secured by a shoulder strap, the corrupted mind inside that head incapable of working the screw-on cap. A black armband with the familiar Firefly logo was affixed to the jacket sleeve with a pair of safety pins.

_Wear it proudly. That’s what Marlene had said to that new guy she left to guard me when she went looking for that Robert guy. She didn’t come back with Robert. She came back with Joel and Tess instead. The guys she left died outside on that street, fighting the army. I heard the gunshots and hid behind those boxes. Those guys never came back inside. All I could do was hide. Hiding kept me safe._

_Kept me safe while they died._

_Oh God… Joel…_

There were sizable fungal growths on the monster’s neck and face. One of the thing’s eyes was bulging out, looking in an entirely different direction than the other eye. It was almost a stalker. Stalkers weren’t blind, but nearly so.

_I’m a rock. I’m a fucking rock._

It looked left and right, snarling, searching for a quarry that had vanished somehow. It wanted to pursue, to press forward, to hunt. But the parasite growing inside its mind was wary of water. A primitive, alien understanding countermanding the standing order to kill and spread the host. This body had its purpose and dying too soon would go against the imperative. It knew, even if the body didn’t. Water too wide, flowing too fast, probably too deep. Too dangerous. A threat to the host without the possibility of propagation. Unacceptable.

The thing twitched and shrieked, black boots sliding about, digging into the mud and grass, at war with itself, driven to hunt, always, but held fast by an invisible leash of self-preservation. It wailed and pawed at its head. Commands, poorly understood. Pain. Frustration. Confusion. Frenzy.

“Gaaaawwwhhhh-hhh-hhkkk-k-kk!” The scream was inhuman, vile. It made Ellie sick to her stomach. “Uuuhhhkk! GUHH!!”

More gunshots from the farmhouse she couldn’t see from her low vantage point, but not the rifle. The shotgun, most likely. Heavy, percussive, rapid.

_Hang in there, Joel. Please… I’d help if I could…_

“GAAAHHHHHKK!!!” the monster on the shore shrieked in murderous vexation, clawing at the air, at itself, at things unseen.

_Let’s just lose our minds together…_

Warm tears slipped from her eyes and were stolen away by the cold torrent whipping past her cheeks.

_I can’t stay here. He needs me. I gotta do something. I’m not going to lose anybody else._

She took a deep breath.

_Oh God… Please help me._

Lungs filled with air, Ellie clamped her mouth shut and her head disappeared under the water.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A potentially sexy day ruined by the infected. Ain’t that always the way?
> 
> Can we take a moment to consider how many bad moments could have been avoided if only Joel had taken a day or two on the way to Wyoming to teach this kid how to swim? It’s not a hard thing to learn! It was late summer! The water was still warm! She’s an athletic tomboy! She would have picked it up quick! Also, pallets don’t work that way, Naughty Dog! ;-)
> 
> Anyhoo, come back next Wednesday when Ellie continues her wet, naked adventure in Chapter Nineteen: The All-Day Bath (Part Two). See you then.


	19. The All-Day Bath (II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie and Joel are separated as they flee a horde of infected. Joel continues to shoot mushroom zombies. Ellie remains wet and naked and badass. R. W. Daniels manages to post a new chapter. Santa prepares to leave for destinations south for his annual night of breaking and entering. The internet debates the merit of black stormtroopers, women riding flying fudgesicles, lightsabers made even more ridiculously dangerous to wield, and robots that look like soccer balls. All this and more are ready for your perusal on the internet tonight! Make some popcorn and get comfy, won’t you? I’ll pour the drinks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy cow, an update! Honestly, I’m as surprised as you are! Really, I think I need to lie down for a bit.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 19 – The All-Day Bath**  
**(Part Two)**

 

_Play it cool. Just play it cool._

On the fifth floor of Dormitory T1, Ellie waits just around the corner from the girl’s shower, a towel clenched nervously in her hand. It’s early evening of May 14. Yesterday, Riley formally enlisted in the Army. At the end of this semester the older girl will become a cog in the FEDRA machine.

_It’s gonna be fine. It’s cool. Everything’s cool._

The night before, she and Ellie masturbated together in their shared dorm room for the first time. For Ellie, it was the most wonderful, amazing, awesomest night of her life. But Riley had been quiet this morning, not saying much as they climbed out of the top bunk they had shared together, sleeping soundly, naked and entwined together. They spoke about the usual start of the day stuff while they got dressed, but it was Ellie who did most of the talking. Riley had been quiet during breakfast in the mess hall too. Tino and Jamaad had dominated the conversation, a glimpse of how things were going be when Riley would be gone in a few months, at the end of August, the end of the second semester of 2033, the end of their days being roommates here at the FEDRA Boston Military Preparatory School. Linh had looked at Ellie with a ‘what’s wrong with her’ expression on her face. Ellie could only shrug as though she didn’t have a clue, as though she hadn’t felt the wet heat coming off of Riley’s cunt the night before, as though she hadn’t felt Riley’s tongue in her mouth, warm and eager and delicious. Riley didn’t notice the exchange between the two other girls at the table. She didn’t even laugh at Jamaad’s joke about the sex talk his dad had given him right before he died.

Ellie takes another calming breath and digs one of her feet into the thong of the blue flip-flop, clenching it with her toes, making it squeak against the tile floor as she turns it back and forth nervously.

_She’ll be cool. I’ll be cool._

Today Riley had corrective work detail, a Saturday afternoon spent picking up trash from the lawn and out of the mesh fence that surrounded the school grounds instead of enjoying a well-earned half-day off, punishment for punching another cadet in the face a few days before, a boy who thought that just because Cherry Jackson was rumored to be easy that she’d appreciate him grabbing her tits in the lunch line. Cherry was about to slap him when Riley’s fist slammed into his nose. When he hit the ground, fingers pressed to his face, blood streaming down his chin, Ellie had kicked him once for good measure. Somehow no one had reported her for that. But Bobby Pierce had seen Riley strike the boy, and like the good little brownnoser he was, he had reported it to the first soldier who came to investigate the altercation. Bobby earned a day pass for that, one that he was using right now to enjoy a little freedom outside the walls of the campus – the fucking asshole even got the whole day off! He didn’t even have to attend Saturday morning drills with the rest of the cadets! Worse still, Jeff, the boy who had grabbed Cherry’s tits got the same punishment as Riley did. Not much in the way of justice, in Ellie’s opinion, but what could you expect? Life sucks. Cherry’s roommate, Trina, even has a shirt that said so.

_We’ll still be cool._

After drills were done and lunch eaten in the mess hall, Riley had reported for her work detail, barely saying a word to Ellie as she left. The younger girl has spent most of the remaining day killing time and trying not to worry that maybe things have changed after what she did with her best friend the night before.

_So we got a little… frisky… horny… snuggly… whatever you want to call it last night… so what? No big deal, right? Puberty makes you horny, that’s what they said in health class. No biggie._

She sighs and shifts from foot to foot nervously, her foam rubber flip-flops squeaking softly on the linoleum floor of the hallway.

_Please don’t let it be a big deal._

_Be cool, Riley. Don’t be mad at me. Just be cool. Please._

Ellie takes a deep breath and twists the towel in her hands, trying to pour her anxiety into it so she won’t look nervous or scared in a few minutes, when it counts.

_Please , Riley._

The soft clopping sound of foam rubber slapping against heels comes to her from around the corner and down the hall. It is just after 5 in the evening. The end of Saturday work detail. Time for Riley to come home.

_I won’t do it again, Riley. I promise. I’m sorry I kissed you. Just don’t be mad._

Ellie takes a deep breath and steps around the corner as nonchalantly as she can manage.

“I was wondering where you were,” Riley says with a weary smile. Her skin glows with the sweat of a long workday. She looks tired. “You weren’t in the room.”

“I was just coming in here to take a shower,” Ellie replies with an easy, totally not suspicious shrug of her narrow shoulders. Like Riley, she is wearing a tank top and shorts. She is just another cadet needing a bath and not at all a girl hoping to spend a little naked time with her best friend. How strange they should both show up here at the same time. It’s just a coincidence, of course. One in a million, really. Even though it happens all the time, oddly enough.

“Didn’t see you in the hallway either, Boo. Taking the long way around?” Riley says with a raised eyebrow as a grinning, blushing Ellie falls in step alongside her.

“Umm…” Ellie stammers. Riley has never called her out on this before.

“It’s cool,” Riley says with a weary groan. “Let’s take a shower, Boo. I need one.”

“Yes, you do,” Ellie teases, a friendly elbow nudging Riley in the ribs. “I could smell you coming a mile away.”

Riley snorts in amusement, adjusting the towel draped over her shoulders. “That’s because they had me on double detail today, the fuckers.”

“Oh?” Ellie asks. They are in the shower now, undressing together as they have countless times before. “What did they have you doing?”

“Trash duty, like I expected,” Riley says, seeing Ellie stealing peeks at her from the corner of her dark eyes, but pretending she doesn’t notice. Ellie isn’t quite as sneaky as she imagines herself to be. “Then the bastards cut the other cadets loose and put me on graffiti detail.”

“Ugh. I hate graffiti removal.” Ellie is naked now, but waits patiently for the tired, slower moving Riley to finish undressing.

Riley pushes her panties down, stepping out of them and standing in front of Ellie with no shame. “Had to clean off one of my own tags, girl. Can you believe that? The red Firefly with the rad flames that said ‘Burn it down’. That shit’s just not right, you know? I’m a fucking artist and FEDRA _does not_ appreciate my talent.”

_Oh thank God. We’re still cool. I think._

_I hope._

Ellie stares at her feet for a moment and Riley knows what’s coming. Ellie is transparent. The girl wears all of her emotions on the outside. They’re right there to be read, if you know where to look. And Riley knows her better than anyone.

“So… You were kind of quiet earlier…” Ellie begins, afraid to look up, too insecure to know better than to bring this up, too inexperienced to let things go unsaid, at least for a little while longer. “Are we… you know… cool?”

“Yeah,” Riley nods, not wanting to hurt Ellie but afraid to encourage her too much. She’s still coming to grips with everything that has happened. She’s enlisted. She’s practically had sex with her roommate. She’s planning to run away but still hasn’t told anyone and she knows she certainly can’t tell Ellie now, not after what happened, not after what they did, not after how incredibly good it felt. Her ex-boyfriend, Montego never made her feel half as good as this little freshman did last night. She’s never thought of herself as a lesbian before, but at this moment, she wishes this shower had a lock on the door. Fuck, the things she would to do Ellie right now. She forces herself to push the simmering images out of her mind and affixes a ‘just friends’ smile to her lips. “We’re cool, Boo.”

Ellie smiles. Riley continues to as well, though not as endearingly as the younger girl. They both want to say more but neither does. Riley changes the subject smoothly before something is said that can’t be taken back or brushed off as a joke.

“I’ll tell you this, girl,” Riley says. “It was totally worth it. I’d punch that fucker in the face again no matter how much of my priceless art I had to destroy.”

“His nose was really gushing blood, huh?” Ellie grins, turning to watch as Riley walks around her towards one of the dozen sets of shower knobs that line the walls of the room.

“Yep,” Riley says brightly, glad to have the subject returned to something safer to talk about. “He reminded me of that guy. You know the one. On that CD?”

“Best CD ever,” Ellie chirps, turning the knobs, trying to get something approaching hot water out of the calcium-encrusted shower head, to no avail. She squeaks and shivers in the cold spray.

Next to her, Riley winces as a cold spray of her own strikes her. Hot water is not for cadets here, only instructors.

“You remember the first time I let you listen to that CD, Ellie?”

Ellie is almost dancing under the cold water, trying to stay warm. She smiles as she speaks. “Fuck yes, I do. How could I forget it? That was the day I discovered the music of my people!”

The young girl plays air guitar and grunts a killer riff through her teeth. Riley laughs and it echoes around the room, bouncing off the old ceramic tiles. It makes Ellie beam with joy.

_It’s gonna be okay. Riley and me are gonna make it out of this place. I just know it._

 

* * *

 

Keeping a grip on the slimy, muddy rocks of the creek bed wasn’t easy. The rushing current pushed and tugged at the naked girl as she crawled along under the surface, eyes no more than narrow slits in the cold, quick water. The air in her lungs was going stale faster than she had expected. Holding her breath in the dormitory day room, trying to outlast Linh while Riley took bets from the cheering girls and threatened to beat her redheaded roommate like a rented mule if she lost to that tiny Vietnamese girl with the huge lungs had convinced Ellie that holding her breath for a minute and half was easy. But sitting on the edge of a pool table, a shit eating grin on your face, was a lot less demanding than crawling and sliding and banging against rocks as a million gallons if ice cold water rolled over you, buffeting and rocking you, trying as hard as it could to drown you. A minute and a half of air in the lungs was soon gone, used up by trembling, straining muscles in less than forty seconds.

_Almost there… almost… gotta get… around… the corner… can’t be seen…_

Away from the calm little bend in the river where she had been bathing in the peaceful moments before the horde of infected had come screeching and tearing from the woods, Ellie was subjected to the full force of moving water. All the rains of the last few days had filled this creek higher than usual, imparting a volume and force to the water that was greater than normal, and the current down here was much fiercer than the relatively calm surface had suggested when she had committed to this plan.

_Almost… c’mon…_

The water was getting deeper, the rocks slipperier. Her lungs were burning. Her muscles were protesting. Her fingers and toes numbed by the cold. If she slipped now, the water would carry her away to a muddy underwater grave and Joel would never find her.

_Gotta take a chance…_

She inched closer to the edge of the creek and came up as quietly as she could. Fifteen feet downstream, give or take. It should have been a half-mile, at least, given how hard the trip had been. She blinked away the water from her eyes and looked, staying as low in the water as she could.

The stalker was still there, looking at the place where the top of her head had been a minute before, when she had been pretending to be a rock in the middle of the river. She waited, hearing the gunshots coming from the farmhouse. The old, decrepit building hadn’t seemed too far away before. But now, with Joel there all alone, fighting off the dozens and dozens of monsters she had seen coming from the woods, it was so far away that the fear in the pit of her stomach was colder than the miserable water surrounding her.

Quietly as she could, she clambered up the riverbank. It wasn’t like the bend where she had been bathing, the grassy shore here didn’t slope down gently to meet the water. Instead, it was a short drop off, about two feet or so, straight down into the water. She had to pull herself up from the water, her fingers digging into the damp, soft earth above her. Her naked, wet body was dappled with little, clinging blades of green grass as she reached the top, sliding along on her belly. Careful to stay low, she raised up on her elbows, trying to see the farmhouse.

Joel was still there, the Remington in his hand, shoving fresh shells into the open loading port. More than a dozen dead infected were scattered across the old field, the decaying road, and the overgrown lawn. Well over a dozen were moving towards him, stepping and stumbling over the bodies of their fallen. Even more were coming from the forest that ringed the edge of the field across the road. Runners, clickers, maybe even a few stalkers. It was hard to discern the telltale details at this distance.

“Fuck,” Ellie whispered, fear and cold almost stealing her voice away entirely.

_I gotta do something. Something. But what? What do I do? Think, Ellie. Think! He needs my help! THINK!_

Her shotgun was with the bike. Maybe it would be of some use to Joel. It was too far away to help her now.

Her little pistol was with her clothes, over by the stalker. Fifteen feet. Less than ten steps, even with short legs like hers.

_A quick dash. That’s all it would take. A sprint across wet grass… on bare feet… slipping and skidding… to an almost certain death. The stalker would be on me before I could get my hands on the gun._

She grimaced in frustration.

_My gun might as well be on the fucking moon._

The big shotgun was roaring again. More screams of dying, ruptured infected.

_Fuck it. I can’t just stay here. I have to help._

She eased slowly up from the ground until she was on her hands and knees. Water ran down her skin and dripped onto the grass. A breeze blew across her. She shivered miserably and began to crawl forward very, very slowly.

_Maybe I can find a rock or something._

Joel’s voice carried easily from the farmhouse.

“Ellie! Stay out of sight! Stay there!”

_Great. Now’s he’s seen me naked and I look like a drowned rat. Thank God that shotgun doesn’t have a scope._

She hesitated for half a second before turning her head to look at him.

He wasn’t looking at her, or even in her general direction. He was throwing one leg over the seat of the Honda, the shotgun swinging across his back from its leather shoulder strap.

_He’s leaving?_

The Honda’s engine came to life.

_HE’S FUCKING LEAVING ME HERE?!_

Joel wheeled the bike around sharply, weaving neatly through the infected rushing towards him, carefully opening the accelerator until he reached the gravel road. He gunned the engine, leading the horde across the bridge spanning the creek that he and the girl had ridden over earlier that morning. He was calling to the to the infected, shouting, luring them away from her, towards him like a crazed pied piper leading a mass of rodents.

“Stay out of sight! I’ll lead them away and circle back for you!”

Angry yet relieved, Ellie almost shouted something in reply as he crossed the bridge upstream from her but her throat clamped down on the words before they could escape her open mouth. Staying hidden meant staying silent.

_They can’t swarm him if they can only come at him from one direction. Smart. But don’t go too far, you ass._

She looked around, saw that the stalker had moved on, towards the rest of the pack. She padded quietly, quickly, towards her gear.

_Gotta get my gun! Some pants! Fucking shoes!_

Quickly as she dared, she darted across the grass towards the little pile of her stuff on the banks of the rushing water. Only a few more steps.

**Click click… Click!**

Another clicker! One that had wandered to the far side of the farm house, come around from behind it, pursuing the receding sound of the Honda, pursuing prey, and had found her instead. It lurched forward, uncomplaining. Prey was prey.

Ellie dropped to one knee, scooped up the pistol, her hands shaking from something worse than the chilly water drying on her bare skin.

The clicker shrieked in triumph, rushing headlong at her. Ellie fired, aiming carefully through slitted eyes.

One shot. Two.

Chunks of fungus broke loose from the thing’s ruined head. Droplets of thick red blood splattered across the shoulders of the monster’s filthy red Pep Boys shirt.

Three shots. Four. Five.

The clicker stumbled, began an uncoordinated fall, sprawling into the knee-high grass of the small field that separated the creek from the old house.

Ellie smiled fiercely.

Somewhere down the road, closer to US 34 than the house, she could hear Joel shouting and shooting, drawing the teeming mass of infected flesh towards him and away from her.

_Told you, Joel. I can take care of my-_

Another shriek to her right, from the direction of the gravel road. A runner, once a woman, now an unreasoning beast in snug jeans and a floral patterned blouse that had probably been pretty fancy once. Another infected close behind the runner, this one the man from before, the almost-stalker in the Firefly uniform. He bellowed in inhuman joy as he sighted his earlier prize with whatever remained of his eyesight.

Ellie pivoted smoothly, aiming up at them at they crested the hill. She fired. The woman in the pretty blouse lost most of her cheekbone as the bullet shattered her face. She tumbled down the hill towards Ellie, blood gushing from her wound as she thrashed and rolled. The Firefly was close behind, sliding and stumbling down the embankment but somehow staying upright as he charged towards the girl. Ellie pulled the trigger again.

Click.

The pistol’s slide was locked back. Empty. The spare magazines were in her backpack, probably at the farmhouse but maybe with Joel now. She didn’t know.

_Fuck._

To her left, the clicker she had dispatched less than a minute before began to struggle to its feet, wailing in pain and resentment. Ahead of her, the one with the ragged hole in her face was getting up as well. The Firefly began to sprint towards her as he reached the mostly level ground by the edge of the creek.

“FUCK YOU!” Ellie screamed and threw the empty pistol at him.

She turned and ran as fast as her legs would carry her. But her skin was even wetter than the grass along the shore. Her feet slipped again and again, unable to find purchase as she tried to sprint. She was covering ground, moving south, away from the farmhouse, but she could hear the Firefly closing the distance.

_Please… No… Not now…_

The flat, grassy bank turned into another hill. She dashed up it, almost falling to her knees more than once as her feet slid around in the slick grass.

_Please…_

She could hear the distorted breathing Firefly, terrifyingly close now. The cordyceps was in his sinus cavities, forcing him to breathe through his mouth in ragged, sloppy gulps.

_Please…_

His boots were heavy in the grass behind her, thudding against the earth. He didn’t slip when he ran. She might have outrun him if it weren’t for his boots and the traction they gave him in this grass.

_No choice!_

She took a deep breath, pivoted sharply, and jumped from the hill into the freezing cold water below just as his fingers reached for the wet, dancing red hair fluttering behind her.

Ellie went in feet first, hoping the thing wouldn’t follow her into the water, hoping the creek wasn’t too deep here, hoping the current wasn’t too fast. The drop was much shorter than the bridge in Pittsburgh and the body of water was much smaller, but Joel wasn’t there to dive in after her this time.

The cold water struck her body like a thousand tiny needles. Reflexively, half of the air in her lungs escaped in an agonized, bubbling shriek.

It was deeper than she had hoped. Her feet slip in the mud at the bottom of the creek bed and she tumbled over, panic lancing through her as she felt the water enveloping her. She scrambled for handholds but the slimy rocks down there were too slick. She glimpsed an old car door, half swallowed in the mud, maybe ten feet way, upstream. In the back of her mind, she wondered where the rest of the car was. Then she was flipped over by the current, twisted around, and carried away downstream.

 

* * *

 

Up close, the building isn’t quite as majestic as it had been when she had first seen it from the rooftop from several blocks away as the first rays of the morning sun struck the gold dome perched above the red brick walls and the glittered off of dozens of tightly spaced windows.

_Still kind of cool looking though. I bet this was really something way back when._

The lawn surrounding the building is long untended and waist high, barely held in check by an ornate stone and iron fence that had once been of such a high quality that even now, twenty years after the collapse of the government that this place had once represented, is still in remarkably good condition.

The street leading to the building is cluttered and cracked, dotted with rusting cars, orange and white striped traffic barrels, several warning signs pointing to the long abandoned Military Safe Zones of Beacon Hill, Fort Point, and Bay Village and a lone, graffiti covered sign indicating the future site of the Boston Quarantine Zone. Someone had painted ‘Full Up’ and ‘Fuck FEMA’ across it. The parking lot in front of the capitol shimmers with a broad puddle of green, foul water. Tall grass, hiding who knows what, rings the edge of the disgusting water. The girl can smell it from here. Mosquitoes buzz in the air around her ears.

“Beacon Street,” Ellie says softly, reading the old rusty sign at the T-shaped intersection. If either of her smuggler companions hears her, they give no indication.

“Home stretch, Tess,” the cranky, tall man says, working his way around a yellow car, a taxi cab, Ellie thinks it is called. If Tess, who seemed to be his boss, has an opinion on this good news, she keeps it to herself.

_These guys don’t say much. I wonder if they’d talk more if I wasn’t around._

Suddenly eager, Tess jogs ahead of the big man. Ellie, not too fond of hanging back with him, breaks into a quick run to catch up with the woman. She sort of likes Tess, who takes the time to answer her questions and even offer information and advice from time to time. Ellie hopes Tess will make it back to the QZ okay once the she leaves town with Fireflies.

The road is on a gradual slope down. The stagnant water that Ellie had mistaken for a shallow puddle is now revealed to be much deeper than she has realized. It’s a large, fetid pool of green foulness that looks deeper than she’s comfortable thinking about. It has never occurred to her that she might encounter something like this on her way to the rendezvous with the Fireflies.

The girl chews her bottom lip and knows she has to say something soon. Each step brings her closer to that green nastiness that she knows she’s not ready for.

She hates being a burden to them. She wants to be tough and cool in front of every adult but double so around badass smugglers like these, but some facts can’t be avoided. She grimaces.

_Fuck. They’re not gonna like this._

“Um…” she begins tentatively. “Just so it’s out there… I can’t swim.”

From somewhere behind her, she thinks she can hear the grumpy guy sigh unhappily, but maybe she imagines it. Who can tell with him? He’s kind of a jerk. He was almost nice to her once or twice today, but he never stays that way for long. She has no idea what his problem is. She doesn’t really care anymore, now that’s she’s almost to the Fireflies.

Tess is more understanding, or at least more diplomatic. She indicates a place along the water’s edge with a wave of her hand, the one not holding the cool .45 handgun, the one a lot like the pistol Riley had carried a few weeks ago, when she dropped back into Ellie’s life without warning and set this whole mess in motion with the best of intentions derailed by the worst sort of luck.

“Look,” Tess says evenly, “It looks like it’s shallow on the right side. Follow me.”

Ellie falls in line behind her, happy that Tess doesn’t seem too bothered by this little setback. It’s not the girl’s fault she can’t swim. No one had ever bothered to teach her. She’s lucky anyone ever bothered to teach her how to tie her fucking shoes or brush her damn teeth. It’s not her fault she’s an orphan, but this woman hasn’t held the girl’s inexperience against her during this trip. It’s a nice change of pace from most of the adults Ellie has known.

_You’re pretty cool, Tess._

Ellie smiles, searches for the right words. She’s not a dumb kid and tries to think of something somebody who isn’t a dumb kid would say. The gross green water is up to her knees now but she doesn’t mind as much with Tess leading the way. The woman is tough and isn’t bothered by the yucky mess so Ellie does her best to not let it bother her either.

“I’m glad Marlene hired you guys,” the girl says with what she hopes sounds like grownup sincerity.

Tess keeps pressing forward, the water rippling, thick and slimy in her wake. She doesn’t look back when she speaks.

“What do you mean?”

The gross water is up to the girl’s belly now. Ahead of her, Tess raises her arms up to keep her hands dry and ready. Ellie lifts her arms up too.

“I know you guys are getting paid for this…” Ellie says, choosing her words with care. She doesn’t want to sound like a suckup or a kid idolizing an adult. “But I’m trying to say thanks.”

Ellie can’t guess that Marlene is not a subject that either of these smugglers cares to discuss for reasons the girl will never know. She likes Marlene. They don’t.

“Yeah,” Tess replies, nonplussed. “Sure thing.”

Behind her, the grumpy dude grunts derisively. Ellie is sure of it this time, even though the loud splashing they’re making almost swallows the sound up.

_Fuck. Should’ve said something else I guess. It’s easier when they’ve got a rank and all you have to say is “yes, sir” or “no, sir.”_

Ellie rounds an old brown van rusting away in the murk. Her foot slips on the unseen slimy step of the stone staircase leading up from the parking lot, out of the water and up to the building where the Fireflies are waiting. She manages to stifle a squeak. She didn’t go over, she didn’t fall on her butt, that nasty green water didn’t close around her head. She didn’t make a fool of herself in front of the smugglers. She breathes a sigh of relief.

Tess hustles up the steps. Ellie follows quickly, her feet squishing in her shoes, her jeans heavy and wet and way too gross to think about for a while.

_We made it. We’re here. It’s gonna be okay. I’m going to put in a good word with the Fireflies about Tess. She earned every penny they’re paying her._

Behind and below her, the big man follows, his boots heavy and soaked, thudding on the stairs. Ellie smiles and tries to hide it from Tess, who seems anxious to make the trade now that they’re so close to the finish line. Ellie adjusts her ponytail and ponders the unknown journey ahead of her. She hopes the Fireflies have a truck or something. She’s a little sad that she’ll probably never see Tess again. Joel eases around Ellie, his hand reaching for the door. She smiles again.

_So long, Captain Grouchy. Can’t say I’m gonna miss you very much._

 

* * *

 

Almost drowning was probably the worst thing ever, she decided. Maybe even worse than actually drowning.

She reached for the surface, her lungs burning, but felt the thick, cold mud instead. The current tossed her about so quickly down here that up and down were becoming too mixed together to reliably tell them apart.

She dug her fingers into the mud, trying to hold the world in place long enough to make sense of it again, but the current was moving so fast. Her body spun around the impromptu anchor point of her hand, pushed by the weight of the moving water, pirouetting neatly about in a semicircle, almost gracefully. Her wrist protested the strains being put upon it. She winced. Bubbles slipped from her nose.

Ellie could see now that the muddy bottom underneath her was much closer then before, as was the rippling, liquid surface above her. She pushed her legs down, tried to dig her toes into the mud, tried to stand up. The creek here was more than shoulder deep. She could barely get her chin above it. The force of the water buffeting her was too much to but the brakes on her trip entirely, but Ellie managed to get her head above the water for a precious few seconds as the hurtling surge worked to pull her feet free of the gooey mud. She tried to clench at it with her toes. Small hands pushed futilely against the rush, fingers splayed, trying to hold the murderous water back in desperation. She gulped down as much air as her sputtering, coughing lungs would permit.

A shape above her suddenly swooped across the sky, blotting out the sun. Massive. Dark. Twin. Two shapes, identical. Ellie realized it was the double bridge of US 34. She and Joel had turned north on the little gravel road on the east side of these bridges, maybe a hundred yards before this river. The farmhouse is somewhere up that gravel road, somewhere north of these bridges. The ride to the farmhouse had been slow going for the Gold Wing. A big bike like that preferred blacktop to gravel.

There was the percussive thunder of gunfire. Booming. The Remington. Through her barely opened eyes, she glimpsed three columns of oily smoke rising up from the unseen asphalt and concrete up there. Molotov cocktails. Flat, sharp reports. Pistol fire this time, not the shotgun. Probably the Colt .45.

“J-Joel… Help!” she sputtered, trying to project her voice like a megaphone, like that stupid bullhorn Superintendent Nemeth loved to use when they were performing drills on the parade ground every Saturday morning.

_Do it right, you slackers! I won’t accept sloppy work from you! No half assing! Not in my army! Show me you’ve got heart!_

“HELP!!”

Her heel struck a rock, unbalancing her. She spun around, tumbled over, and the surging water pulled her down again. She swallowed the remaining words still unsaid in her mouth so she wouldn’t have to swallow any water. She glimpsed the outline of the bridge, distorted and deformed by the churning water and then it was gone, rocketing away from her, taking Joel with it.

 

* * *

 

Joel is down there somewhere, invisible beneath the dark, filthy water of the flooded Boston subway tunnel. Ellie knows this. She keeps reminding herself of it. He’s down there and he’s coming back. He won’t leave her here, alone, for long. This guy is kind of a dick, sure, but he won’t leave her behind. He’s a smuggler. She’s his cargo. He won’t get paid if he doesn’t deliver her. And he promised Tess he would. So he has too. That’s how it works. He’ll come back.

She compresses her mouth into a thin line and exhales through her nose.

_Fuck, this place sucks. We were wrong, Riley. Outside sucks. It sucks donkey balls. It’s all rust and slime and broken walls and pieces of glass and I fucking hate it._

The rusted subway car she stands in echoes with the sounds of the gently lapping water at the far end. Each drip coming from the ceiling of the tunnel beyond the open door, almost entirely hidden in the smothering darkness, rebounds inside the cold, dead interior of the corroding subway car.

Plop… plop…plop…

Each little, echoing drip sets her teeth on edge. Her fingers dig into the cushion of the seat that she is standing near.

Plop… plop…

She realizes she is holding her breath and forces the staleness out of her lungs with an angry hiss. The spores hanging in the air around her dance unseen.

_Come back, you butt head. I told you I can’t swim._

The cracked and splitting orange-red vinyl of the old seat yields easily to her scared grip, splitting open with a muffled crack. She’s alone in the darkness with nothing but the deadly water and the thick, evil darkness concealing who knows what sort of hideous monster surely waiting to pounce, chomping at the chance to eat a tasty treat like her.

_We’ll figure something out. That’s what he said before he jumped into the water and disappeared._

_Man, fuck this guy. Why didn’t we just find another way around? There’s gotta be more than one way out of Boston, right?_

Clenched in her grip, the dry, brittle foam underneath the vinyl finally comes apart dramatically, bursting into a small cloud of yellow dust that reminds her of the cloud of cordyceps spores she had seen when they first came down here, fleeing the soldiers and that Humvee with the big machine gun. There’s a heavy cloud of spores down here in this tunnel as well, but it’s too dark to see it very well.

_Immune or not, I bet this isn’t doing my lungs much good. Probably like inhaling smoke or something… probably worse, actually._

“Shit,” she whispers to no one at all.

_Fuck it. I’m not waiting for him come back from his scuba diving vacation. There’s more than one way out of here and I’m going to find it._

She turns around, steps out of the subway car and drops easily down to the rotting tracks. Her switchblade is in her hand, her thumb ready on the release button.

“Fuck, I could use some light right now,” she mutters, working her way around the car, feeling her way along in the darkness with an outstretched hand and carefully propping toes, moving cautiously, alertly, moving past a second set of cars on a different track, how many subway cars did a city need anyway?, climbing up to the raised platform along the edge of the tunnel. It is badly cracked, more rubble than wall in a few places. Careful not to twist an ankle, she makes her way to the top of it easily enough. “Flashlight… a candle… a match… mayonnaise jar of fireflies… fuck, I’d light a fart if I could.”

The tunnel is partially collapsed in a few places but there are holes here and there in the rubble, small ones, much too tiny for the big man but passable enough for a small girl who’s never had enough to eat in her life. A little squirming, and bit of squeezing, a swear word or two, and she is through to the other side.

She hears water and the fear begins to congeal in her stomach again. She reaches out with her hand, feels the rusting safety rail of the platform, the top of it an inch or two above the surface. It won’t be pleasant, but it’s not deep enough to drown her. She wiggles out and drops down into the water.

“Fuck my life,” she hisses. It’s even colder than the water outside the capitol building was. She shudders and she begins to trudge forward, fording her way through the nasty wetness.

A splash. A voice in the dim gloom, ahead and to her right. His.

“Ellie?”

_Is that concern I hear? Maybe. Maybe not._

_Probably not._

“I’m fine,” she responds, trying to sound more terse than tense. The water on this side of the platform is up to her ribs. Cold, unpleasant, full of all kinds of floating crap that she can feel bumping against her and doesn’t want to think about too much.

_Yeah. I’m just fucking peachy, you cranky old fucker. Peachy. Why don’t you come out of the water already? What are you? A trout?_

What little light filters down from the tiny cracks of an arched ceiling overhead that was sure to collapse at any moment and bury her alive and therefore should not be thought about, ever, reveals a mostly submerged set of subway cars spanning the expanse of water ahead. One good leap from the edge of the handrail would carry her across to them. They might work as a bridge for a girl that was brave or dumb enough.

_Too bad I’m not that dumb._

Her foot bumps against something under the water and it takes her a second to realize that it’s a stair. The handrail rises out of the water to a higher, drier platform and she breathes a sigh of relief. Disgusting water pours from her jeans as she sloshes her way up to blessed terra firma.

_Fuck me, I need a bath now. Gross._

“There’s a ladder.” His voice comes from the darkness, echoing in the large chamber. “Maybe we can use this.”

She looks around, sees nothing.  Joel has swum off towards something over by one of the many ruined columns still holding the roof up in defiance of gravity and common sense so she takes a moment to look around. Her nose finds it before her eyes do. She grimaces. There is a dead man here. Damp environments are not kind to decaying flesh. He hasn’t been dead very long but the rot is extensive. The dim light hides most of it, but the stench carries just fine in the dark. There is note next to him and a flashlight by his hand.

_Score!_

She gingerly nudges the lamp away from his decaying fingers with the handle of her knife.

_Sorry, dude. But I need this more than you._

It’s a periscope-style light, just like Joel’s. She pushes the little button up and a bright beam of white lances through the darkness. She grins. The fear she has been hiding inside her begins to abate substantially. Ellie isn’t one to be scared of the dark. But some dark is scarier than others.

Joel is splashing towards her. She points the light in his general direction.

“Look,” she says. “It works.”

He says nothing. He’s not much for conversation. She hopes they’ll find the Fireflies soon. Spending too much time with somebody this grumpy won’t be much fun.

Ellie shines the light on the dead man. A zillion cockroaches that had been nesting on him scuttle away from the circle of illumination, rushing for the safety of the blackness.

“Gross,” she whispers to herself. Whatever that note says, she doesn’t want to read it anymore. It could be a map to pirate treasure for all she knows, but seriously, fuck that note. She ties her new light to the shoulder strap of her backpack using a spare shoelace she has in her pocket.

_Just like he wears his… Like Tess wore hers. Smuggler style, I guess._

She smiles proudly.

_Looks kind of badass, if you ask me._

He is pushing something ahead of him as he swims towards her. She turns to face him as he arrives, curious as to what interesting new thing he’s brought for her. She frowns. It’s a wooden pallet, similar to those that she so often saw stacked up behind the mess hall, bumps against the edge of the platform with a dishearteningly hollow thunk. It wobbles as the water ripples around it.

“Get on,” Joel says, using as few words as possible. How did Tess ever put up with this man?

“Really?” she asks in mild disbelief. Could this really be his plan? Can this be considered a plan at all?

_I bet Tess was the one who made the plans._

“Ellie,” he says in that tone that says this isn’t a thing to be debated.

“Okay, okay,” she mutters, unhappy and not wanting to do it, but her flashlight has revealed that this part of the platform is a dead end. There’s nowhere else to go.

_I’m trusting you, buddy boy. You drown me and Marlene’s gonna be pissed._

She steps onto the pallet, moaning in dread as it begins to sink under her weight. Joel grunts and keeps it as steady for her as he can manage.

“Be careful,” she moans and hates how weak she sounds.

Riley wouldn’t piss and moan. Riley would kick him in the face if she even thought the pallet was going to tip over. Ellie resolves to do the same thing.

Joel begins to push the girl on her makeshift raft through the water, never noticing how one of her legs is exceptionally tense, cocked and ready to send a size five-and-a-half basketball sneaker smacking into his forehead at the first sign of trouble.

“I gotcha,” he says reassuringly.

_You’d better. Because if I get dunked, you’re gonna eat shoe, dude._

 

* * *

 

Ellie didn’t remember putting it there, but her head was above water again. This seemed to happen now and again. She’d been in this river for most of her life now, she was sure of it. Years and years in this river. The biggest river in the world. The Mississippi could suck it. This river was so big it was practically an ocean. Biggest body of water in the entire universe, and somehow it hadn’t managed to kill her yet. Either she was the baddest badass that had ever lived or this river was toying with her. This river was a dick.

_Fuck!_

She knew that the river would get bored of keeping her alive soon so she had better play its sadistic little game while she still could.

She went under again but she kicked her legs out, her feet striking the bottom, propelling her upward. She quickly bobbed to the surface, sputtering and coughing, pushed along by the current. She tried again and again, always in vain to push her way to the banks, but she couldn’t get close to it. The current was strongest in the middle and it held her fast.

_Shit!_

The river never let her breathe for very long, but each brief opportunity gave her the chance for another few precious gulps of air. She couldn’t see. She was facing downstream this time and her hair was plastered across her eyes by the force of the water pummeling the back of her head.

_Fuck!_

This river was without end. She would be an old lady with gray hair when she finally reached the end, got out and dried off. Maybe there would be a concession stand at the end of this ride. Maybe she could finally get a chilidog.

_Fuckfuckfuck! Where’s a fucking beaver dam when you need one!_

She pushed her hair out of the way with numb fingers and tried to blink through the stinging spray. She saw a high bank leaning out over the river ahead of her, downstream, carved out by the unrelenting force of the recent flooding. It had rained damn near every morning lately, and the river was swollen with all the runoff water. A rotted tree was up there on the scooped out embankment ahead of her, jutting out over the river on a thick ledge of dirt. The tendrils of its roots protruded from the muddy shelf, hanging down in thick, strong loops, dangling almost to the water.

The current was carrying her towards them. She thrust her legs down like cold, numb stilts, trying to keep herself from going under again. Her toes brushed the bottom lightly. She could feel herself turning slightly. She twisted, trying to correct it. She couldn’t miss this chance. She flexed her unfeeling fingers. They felt like somebody else’s hands.

_Oh God… please… Just get me out of this river… and I’ll never do anything bad again._

She reached up for the onrushing roots with desperate fingers.

_I’ll become a nun! I promise! Just like Sister Anne! I swear it!_

The current near the edge swirled unexpectedly. She was turning, twisting around. She flailed with her feet, almost throwing her back out as she flung her hips around. Fingers made stupid by the cold water reached, strained. She hissed a spewing stream of filthy words unsuited for a nun.

_Got it!_

It was a near thing. Her hands didn’t want to cooperate. She couldn’t feel the root. Not very much anyway. Just a dull pressure against her palms that made no sense to her foggy brain. She had to look at it to assure herself that it was actually in her hands.

Ellie cursed and held on with fingers that didn’t want to listen to her. She hooked her elbow around the biggest root, the water continuously tearing at her, trying to force her to resume her journey with it, to carry her along with it to her watery, unmarked grave and the hell the old preacher had told her surely awaited a bad seed like young, irredeemable Eleanor S. Williams. Her legs twisted about in the rushing water, flesh aching from the cold. She whimpered. The root began to tear away from the soil a little. She heard someone make a terrified squeaking noise and she was embarrassed to realize that it was her. She tried not to panic, not to move, to stay perfectly still in the water, to put as little strain on that big root as possible. This root was her best friend now and the only think keeping her anchored to life in this fucked up world.

_Help me out, Mr. Root. That river is a dick and I need your help. I’ve always liked trees. I’d be an elf if I could._

She took a deep breath followed by another. Her body had almost forgotten how to use oxygen, or so it seemed. She decided to rest for a minute while her body remembered what to do now that her days as a mermaid were over. She remained still, and little, and calm. She smiled. She was going to make it. She was sure of it. That tree up there was her friend.

_Fuck you, Mr. River. Fuck you very much._

She peed, her bladder suddenly feeling very full from all the water she had swallowed. It was the longest urination of her life, she was sure of it. Maybe it was the biggest pee anyone had ever taken in the history of ever. Ellie smiled and let the water pounding against her carry it away. She giggled.

“That’s for you, Mr. River. Ellie Williams says you can lick her balls.”

She closed her eyes and drew in one more sustaining, empowering breath.

_Okay. Gotta get up to dry land. Gotta get out of this water._

She began to pull herself up, hand over hand, through the tangle of hanging roots, trying to get out of the water, trying to get closer to the sky. But teenage girls weren’t built with upper body strength in mind. It was arduous, slow going. She was sure autumn would be over and winter arrived by the time she managed to pull herself up enough to bring the looping roots within reach of her feet.

Now able to use the greater strength of her legs, she made better progress, climbing her way towards the top. But it was slow going. The shelf of dirt and rock had been hollowed out by the passage of the late autumn rainfall roaring down the creek, eroding the edges of the bank. She grimaced. This wasn’t a sleep bank. This was a ceiling of dirt and tree roots over her head.

_Goddamnit, I’m going to make such a shitty nun if I survive this fucked up day._

She tugged at a dangling root, her legs crossed at the knees and holding tightly to another cluster of roots beneath her. She hung almost parallel to the water rushing by below her, her bare skin wet and dripping from the endless spray of water, her small body shivering, her teeth chattering. She cursed and prayed for strength. The roots scraped at her flesh.

_Worst nun ever._

Ellie reached up with her right hand, feeling along the top of the overhang for a handhold of any kind. She tried to make sense of the signals her fingers were sending her.

_Grass… grass… pebbles… empty bottle… come on… fuck, give me something better… anything… I’m gonna be a nun for you, God, so get off your stupid cloud and help…_

_A root!_

She wrapped her fingers around it and gave silent thanks. She didn’t want to be a nun but she didn’t want to die either.

She took a deep breath, knowing that if her numb fingers failed her, she would plummet down, back into the river and to a certain death.

_Oh, man…Can I do this? … I don’t know…I’m so fucking tired…_

Ellie returned her hand to the safety of the root she was clinging to. She considered waiting for Joel instead. There was no way he wouldn’t come looking for her.

_But he’ll never find me down here. He won’t even make it this far down the creek for hours, probably. No way I can hang on that long._

Already the mist suspended in the air around her was chilling her to the bone. She shivered, shaking almost to the edge of convulsion.

_Oh Jesus, I’m so cold._

Even with clothes on, this would have been a miserable experience. Naked and wet, chilled to the bone, she knew she didn’t have long before her overtaxed muscles gave out entirely.

_Gotta take a chance. I have to save myself. Have to try._

She reached up again, her fingers finding the root she had felt before.

_Here goes. If you’re up there, Riley, put a good word in for me, in case this doesn’t work._

She let go with her other hand, swinging out over the water. For one moment, she hung there, feet dangling, toes in the water. She got her other hand up there, fingers scrambling for the root. She hooked them around it, felt her thumbs pressing against each other. This wasn’t much of a handhold. She knew she couldn’t hang there long.

_Come… on… bitch… pull… harder…_

Pull-ups didn’t come as easy for Ellie as they did for Joel. Usually when he boosted her up the side of a wall, she had to use her feet, scrabbling for traction along the surface, to help push her up and over. But that wasn’t an option today. All she had was the strength in her arms. She pulled, hard, trying like hell to lift all 97 pounds of herself up to the edge of the green grass above her head. The clouds overhead were dark, loaded with rain.

Young muscles protested from the strain. Tears of frustration fell from her face and raced off with the water waiting patiently for her to come back.

_Riley… Joel… Mom…_

Her arms were burning, her shoulders aching, her jaw clenched together so tightly she was sure her teeth that she had worked so hard to take care of would start to crack apart. Eight feet from the water to the top of the bank. Maybe ten. It felt like she was climbing a mountain.

_Fuck…this… shit…_

Finally the sensation of grass, crisp and dry, under her right forearm. She got her elbow over the edge, praying the dirt edge would hold. She levered herself up, naked legs swinging wildly. Both elbows on the ground now, mud squishing itself against her bare chest, slithering its way into her armpits as she inched her way up.

_Yuck. Gross._

She reached out with one tired hand, trying to get a handhold in the grass. Her fingertips chiseled their way into the firm earth. Her whole body quivered with the effort. She was exhausted, her reserves nearly spent. The water surged and crashed below, eager for her return.

_Pull… forward… more… more…_

Her teeth were clenched tightly. A sound as much a scream and a grunt filled the air, escaping from her body, taking the last bits of her strength with it. Her eyes were screwed shut so intensely that she saw stars exploding behind her eyelids.

_Nuns wear really warm robes…It won’t be so bad…_

Her belly dug across the muddy edge. Almost halfway there now.

_Almost… C’mon…_

She brought a knee up, over, pushed herself forward with it using whatever strength was left in her tired leg. With a strained grunt and one final surge, she cleared the edge and collapsed facedown on the grass, arms and legs limp as noodles, all of her trembling. There was a gnarled root pressed uncomfortably against her belly. She didn’t care.

_Look on the bright side… You can smack all the orphans you want once you’re a nun…_

She wanted to laugh but more wisely chose to breathe in great gulps of air through the fresh grass she had her face buried in, her entire body still shaking from the exertion. The front of her was smeared with thick mud from collarbones to knees. She wasn’t bothered in the least by it. She was alive. Who gives a fuck about a little gross and goopy mud when the alternative was a squeaky clean death in frigid waters of the evil Imadick River.

The girl grinned into the pillow of dry grass, feeling it prick and tickle her cheeks. The sun warmed her a bit and the water on her skin began to dry slowly.

A word slipped loose, more exhaled than spoken.

“Thanks.”

She spoke to the old dead tree, to the spirits of this forest, and to anyone else who happened to be listening.

_You did it, Boo. I’m proud of you, “Sister Eleanor.”_

Ellie tried to giggle, but she was too damn tired.

_C’mon. Admit it. You don’t want me as a nun, God. I’d be terrible at it. We both know it. But I promise I’ll save the world from the evil mushroom people if you’ll just give me the chance. Deal?_

 

* * *

 

The corporal at the front desk downstairs had assured the soaked cadets returning early from the training grounds that it wasn’t a hurricane, but it sure seems like one. The water is hitting the window of dorm room 529 with such force that Ellie is certain it’s going to crack at any minute.

“What if that glass breaks? Do you think the room will fill up with water? Like a big fish tank?” Ellie says, grinning slyly at Riley, who is sitting in the nice chair, the one that spins, the one with the armrests and the little wheels. Sometimes they take turns spinning each other around and around in that cool chair. Riley makes Ellie sit in the crappy folding metal chair most of the time. This old office chair is Riley’s magnificent throne.

“I guess we’ll drown then,” Riley snorts, “since neither one of us can swim.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Ellie sighs deeply for dramatic effect. “Woulda been nice to have a fish tank though.”

Riley giggles. Ellie doesn’t see the world the way most people do.

“I’m happy we got out of drill practice today,” Riley says, leaning back regally. The fancy office chair does that too. This chair does it all.

“Yeah, it’s nice to have the whole Saturday off,” Ellie chirps, coming away from the window, accepting reluctantly that it’s not going to explode spectacularly and flood the room with sea life.

She picks up the old metal chair from its resting spot by the bookshelf and carries it closer to Riley. She unfolds it and takes her place at Riley’s side. The older girl swivels around to bring them face to face.

“I wish it would rain every Saturday,” Ellie grins, leaning forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “I hate drills.”

“Me too,” Riley agrees, pondering just how long she will let Ellie get comfortable before ordering her to get up and bring her a glass of water or something equally menial. The thing about freshmen is that you can’t let them think they aren’t the personal servants of senior cadets. The social order must be preserved.

Ellie says “I hate bayonet practice most of all. I’m not a big fan of gutting people. It’s gross.”

“Straw dummies and plastic knives, girl. Not quite the same thing as doing it for real.”

“Close enough. And it’s not like you’ve ever gutted anyone,” Ellie teases.

“Pfft,” Riley snorts and turns slightly away from Ellie. She waves her hand haughtily, dismissively. “How do you think I got this room to myself in the first place?”

Ellie giggles.

“And you’d better stay in line and do what I say, Cadet Williams,” Riley says, cutting her eyes sideways at Ellie, smiling coolly, “or I’ll have to bury you in an unmarked grave next to Liz Rooker’s body, behind the field latrines. It’s where I hide the corpses of all my former roommates, you know.”

Ellie giggles again.

“So I should keep letting you win at Monopoly then?” the younger girl grins.

“ _Let_ me win?” Riley says with a raised eyebrow. “Girl, you couldn’t win at Monopoly if you were playing by yourself.”

Ellie sticks her tongue out at Riley. The truth hurts.

The sole light fixture on the ceiling flickers again. The power’s going to go out tonight. No doubt about it.

“Better break out the candles, huh?” Ellie asks.

“Yeah,” Riley laments. “Looks like it’s gonna get dark soon. I’ll get the matches.”

They get up and pass each other, Riley going to the laundry hamper where she hides her little contraband matchbook, Ellie to the tall, narrow, wooden case that once held vinyl records in the long gone decades when the LP was king. Now the oddly deep and narrow shelves are stuffed with cassette tapes, compact discs, and the assorted items that the teenage occupants of this room thought were cool or cute enough to collect. There are a pair of mostly melted candles there too, rescued from the church trashcan by Riley the winter before. Riley doesn’t have much use for church, but they throw out some good stuff sometimes.

Beneath the red candle, Ellie notices a new CD, or at least one she has not seen before. She picks it up for a closer look. The cover shows a white guy with long, dark hair and fashionably sexy beard stubble. Blood, red and clotted, covers his face in a thick band from his nose, down his chin, and all the way to the neckline of his white t-shirt. His sweaty bangs are stuck to his face and tangled in the blood around his mouth. It is the coolest thing Ellie has ever seen. Ever.

“This… has got to be… the greatest album… of all time,” she says in a hushed, reverent tone. Breathless adoration. She is ready to build a new religion based solely on this album cover. It speaks cosmic truths to her, imparting understandings of coolness no mere mortal could have ever conceived without divine guidance.

Riley is at her shoulder, the almost empty matchbook in her hands. She snorts at Ellie’s unbridled enthusiasm. Ellie does nothing halfway.

“Got that from Mel yesterday while we were in math class. Traded a shirt for it when the instructor wasn’t looking.”

“Mel?” asks Ellie, her eyes still fixed to the holy grail in her hand. “Who’s that?”

“Melody Phillips. A girl in Dorm T3. She wanted that pink tank top of mine so I traded her for this CD. It looks pretty cool.”

“Heck yes it does!” Ellie enthuses.

She puts the candle down and opens the plastic case. Inside is the slightly yellowing platter of a CD-R with the words “AWK MIX” written across the front with a black permanent marker. The handwriting is old, the ink fading to a dark purple. For a moment, Ellie wonders who wrote this and what became of them. She loves the past. She sometimes imagines that there is no present and that she is just a ghost, haunting a world where the future has died and left all these neat mysteries behind.

“Looks like somebody made it themselves,” Riley remarks, picking up the red candle and carrying it over to the little dresser beneath the window, next to their bunk beds.

Ellie marvels at a vanished world in which people could make their own CDs. She tries to imagine the machine involved in such a thing. It must have been really big. The size of a refrigerator at least. Maybe even bigger. So big that it took up a whole room.

“Can we listen to it?” she asks softly, overawed by the badass image on the cover.

Riley finishes folding and smoothing a small square of old aluminum foil that she rescued from the kitchen trash months and months ago. She sits the candle on it and leaves the matchbook next to it. If the power goes out tonight, they’ll be ready.

“Say please,” Riley teases.

“Please, Riley?” Ellie asks sincerely, wringing the hem of her tank top in distress.

“ _Miss_ Riley,” the older girl smirks.

“Ugh,” Ellie groans and prepares to grovel if she has to. “ _Pretty please_ , Miss Riley? C’mon. Don’t be a butt. I’ll be your slave for a week if we listen to this.”

“That’s more like it,” the older girl smiles with a smug shrug of victory. “Bring it over here. It’s gotta be better than stomping your sorry butt in Monopoly again.”

The boom box is on the other side of the room, on the taller dresser by the door. She crosses to it, Ellie hot on her heels, and powers it up. Another button press and the tray slides out with a tired squeal. Like everything in this room that isn’t the girls, it is old and worn out, barely hanging on to life. Ellie places the disc in the tray very carefully. This disc is a holy relic and you must show it respect. The tray slides close and Riley presses the button with the triangle on it. The disc spins to life. The speakers hum.

A holy choir sings, filling the room with the fullness of their joyous sound. Drums join in, pounding out the gospel. A piano begins to bang a series of uplifting notes. A guitar arrives to wail a fuzzy, overdriven hallelujah.

Riley nods. She prefers something with a little more heart, but this is okay.

“Not too bad,” she says.

Ellie, on the other hand, is dumbstruck. Nothing in the history of music has anything ever rocked so hard. This must be the last song played before the world was destroyed. Surely after this song was finished, God knew that nothing else was worth recording and so in His wisdom, He knocked over the big sandcastle of human civilization that He had made and told His surviving people that His work here was done and then He fucked off for good, leaving them with this song: His last message to His creation.

“Life’s too short!” the man on the disc bellows out. “So do what you want!”

Ellie begins to nod her head in time with the driving beat. She says nothing. Nothing needs to be said.

Riley watches her, a knowing smile spreading across her face. Her young friend is transfixed. More impressive, she’s silent. Riley has never seen Ellie be so quiet before. Not in this room anyway.

“Would you give up all you want just to keep the things you’ve got?” the man grunts. “Would you give up all you’ve got to get the things you want?”

The young girl’s eyes are closed in adoration and contemplation. She is receiving communion.

“All the things we want are here!” he sings. “We have to face our fears!”

Ellie nods in total understanding. Riley rolls her eyes and grins. Guitar licks fill the air. Ellie can feel them, can almost see them.

Holy words hammer at her, chiseling away her doubts. “When we look into the future, to the place we haven’t gone, we see what we are becoming. We have known it all along!”

Ellie begins to spasm, convulse, bounce, hopping in place on socked feet. Riley isn’t sure, but she thinks Ellie may be trying to dance. The older girl crosses her arms and holds a stream of giggles back, covering her mouth with four tightly pressed fingers. Ellie can’t see the expression on her friend’s face. She is blinded by the righteousness of rock.

“If we wait until tomorrow,” he preaches from the timeless, holy mountaintop of unspeakable awesomeness, shaking the very foundations of the girl’s thirteen-year-old soul, “will tomorrow ever come?”

Ellie’s fists are clenched. She starts to pump them more or less in time with the beat.

“If you have a heart that’s in pain, don’t be afraid!” the prophet roars, a choir of growling angels joining him. “You’re not to blame! There’s a better world inside of us! Where we always thought it was!”

Ellie continues to hop in a tight circle, head down, nodding, becoming enlightened to greater truths. Riley chuckles. It becomes a warm, chiding laugh. She can’t hold it back any longer. Ellie is making an adorable ass of herself.

“You don’t need to hide! You can open up your eyes!” he shouts.

The older girl shakes her head. “I think we’ve found the music of your people, Boo.”

“Woo!” Ellie exclaims, still bouncing around in front of the altar of the sacred boom box. She is punching the air, speaking in tongues, lost in the rapture of this divine revelation. She has found God and He plays the guitar like a fucking boss. “WOO!!”

Riley smiles.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won’t go into all the details about why this chapter is so late. Suffice it to say that overtime continues even as the holidays approach. Volunteers were requested and since I was the guy who just had a week of vacation, it wouldn’t have been right if I didn’t take one for the team.
> 
> Anyhoo, on to the notes that are actually about the story!
> 
> First, please note the recurring theme of water in all of Ellie’s flashbacks. Also, it was because of the flashback-heavy nature of this part of the story that I decided to break this chapter into three pieces. The first and last parts don’t have them so they would have taken a long time to enter this narrative and then left while there was still a lot of story to tell. It made the chapter seem unbalanced to me, so I broke it into three parts instead.
> 
> Ellie and Riley’s mix of slang is always fun to right. These poor girls exist in a present assembled from scraps of the past with nothing new to offer except their own experiences. Music, slang, and pop culture from several decades are all stirred together in one big pot for them, and for kids growing up in the remains of the world, niggling little details like what was fashionable in which decade don’t matter one bit. It’s all new to them.
> 
> For those wanting to know more about the untold joke in the first flashback about Jamaad’s dad giving him the “sex talk”, here it is. I stole it from a guy I knew in the Air Force. Maldonado had a million of these, and this one goes “When I turned thirteen, my dad sat me down and showed me a bunch of pictures of all the bad stuff that would happen to me if I didn’t wear a rubber… All the pictures were of me.”
> 
> It was fun to write Ellie and Joel from an earlier point in their relationship, when neither liked or trusted the other very much. I’ve tried to avoid using moments from the game in my story up to this point. That part of the narrative has already been told and I don’t want to be seen as piggybacking too heavily on the source material. But I made an exception in this case because I wanted to take a peek into Ellie’s head when she confronted that disgusting water outside the capitol building in Boston and we learned she couldn’t swim. Not only that, but she was very close to what she thought was the end of her journey with Joel and Tess, so I thought a bit of inner monologue there would be fun to explore. Also, when Joel leaves Ellie in the flooded subway tunnel, Ellie finds her way to him on the other side without his help, giving the player a glimpse into Ellie’s proactive nature that becomes crucially important as the game progresses. I thought that little missing gap in the subway might be fun to fill in with some more of Ellie’s inner voice, to see that even that early in the journey, Ellie would try to take care of herself.
> 
> Also, I’m sure that most players didn’t leave Ellie alone in that rusting subway car in the flooded tunnel as long as I did, but I got turned around down there and that poor kid had to wait a long damn time for me to find the way through to meet her on the other side.
> 
> The first flashback takes place the day after “Tomorrow Is Just Another Lie, ” when the girls have been together for almost a year, and the last flashback occurs when Ellie is still thirteen and has only been Riley’s roommate for eight or nine days. Numerous OCs are referenced in these flashbacks including Melody (first appeared in volume 1, chapter 14), Cherry Jackson, Linh, Jamaad, Bobby Pierce, and lots of others. I think they add a little flavor to Ellie's school days.
> 
> The song on the boom box is “Totally Stupid” by Andrew W.K. I envy Ellie and everyone her age. I miss when music had the power to speak to me like that. The first time I heard The Ramones, my understanding of the world changed.
> 
> And with that, it’s time to wrap this up. Drop by next Saturday when Ellie’s naked adventure wraps up and she puts some clothes on in Chapter Twenty: The All-Day Bath (Part Three).


	20. The All-Day Bath (III)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie has been separated from her protector and must find her way back to him. The untamed, wild world beyond the walls of Boston is scary enough to a teenager traveling alone and without a map; so finding herself naked and unarmed on this quest only makes things that much worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Flying To Wyoming’s new “Saturday Only Updates” begins in earnest, at least until I’m able to get a few chapters edited and ready to post well ahead of the deadline. This late in the story, that’s unlikely to happen, given my workload lately. But rest assured, I’m going to finish this story – it’ll just to take a few weeks longer than I originally thought.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 20 – The All-Day Bath**  
**(Part Three)**

 

She couldn’t guess how long she lay there, face pressed into the earth, nostrils filling with the rich, loamy smell of it, trembling and cold, excited to still be alive, but utterly spent. The root digging deeper into her stomach with each shuddering breath was beginning to become an annoyance. She rolled over slowly, groaning pitiably.

Above her, it looked like rain. She knew she should get up, start working her way back up the river, to the farmhouse. That was the only place Joel would know to look for her. He would still be alive. She was certain of it. Nothing could kill that man. She wanted to be just like him one day. Badasses like them should always stick together.

The slate gray clouds above her, drifting lazily and slowly across the sky, suddenly jumped ahead in their journey. The shift was jarring. It took her a moment before she realized that she had fallen asleep. She was still sprawled out in the grass by the dead tree. Her fingers informed her that the mud coating her belly wasn’t dry yet, so she easily deduced that she hadn’t been out for long.

“Fuuuucccck,” she groaned, sitting up, digging her elbows into the grass, her abdominal muscles telling her what a terrible idea this was.

She could only barely lift her arms to place them in her lap as she sat in a slouch. All the muscles in her shoulders and back were aching. Even her jaw was sore. She was covered in bruises and scratches. The thick, warm grass felt good beneath her butt. Joel had told her that people used to stuff their beds with grass and straw. Way back in the pioneer days, when people were crossing this part of the county for the first time, he had said. He had a bunch of stories about the people who had crossed this land back before the roads and bridges were built. Ellie wondered where he had learned all those cool stories. The book-loving teenager had never heard of “Little House on the Prairie”, didn’t know of the books about a girl who had lived through those times, didn’t know about another little girl that Joel had read all those stories to, one chapter at a time, night after night, before bedtime. No one had ever read Ellie a bedtime story.

She slowly teetered up on sore feet, arches and soles and toes all bruised and scraped by the bottom of the creek and the roots of the tree that had saved her. She weaved about drunkenly, barely able to stand. Hands gripping her knees, shaking like a leaf, she steadied herself, eccentrically remembering a billboard she had seen along the highway yesterday, urging her to join the Galesburg Women’s Fitness Center and take some pilates classes to improve her core strength, give her more energy, and lose that stubborn belly fat. The billboard had assured her that it was the finest health center in all of northwestern Illinois and the first month’s membership was free.

“I really should join a fitness club, do some pilates, get my butt in shape for bikini season,” she wheezed, unsure exactly what a pilate was. She pondered the words on the billboard.

_Core strength? More energy? Belly fat?_

She straightened up, groaned, and patted her flat, muddy stomach with barely responsive fingers.

_Only need two out of the three. I should ask for two month’s free membership._

Slowly, each step a small victory for her, she began to trudge her way back up the river, along the grassy bank. The US 34 bridge was nowhere in sight. The forest was thick on both sides of the river, and there were several twists and turns ahead. Maybe it was close and she just could see it.

_Or maybe you’re halfway to Texas._

She sighed and groaned in irritation as something unpleasant occurred to her.

_I’m on the wrong side of the fucking creek. I should be over there. That’s the side the old farm is on. Fuck._

She hoped it wasn’t too far back to the highway, back to the farmhouse, back to the bike. Back to Joel. She didn’t have much energy left.

_Just one muddy foot in front of the other, Ellie. One step at a time._

_Gotta find Joel. Gotta find some clothes._

_Hopefully, I’ll find the clothes before I find Joel. But at this point, I’m not picky._

**. . .**

Ellie was a city girl, through and through. She’d read stories about the woods. She knew that country girls and Indian princesses and elven sorceresses had great and fun adventures running barefoot through the forest, in tune with nature and faster than the bad guys who chased them in big, heavy boots. Barefoot was the way to go, that’s what the stories said. To Ellie, walking without shoes was a novel yet unpleasant experience. It wasn’t as magical and liberating as she had imagined. With great reluctance, she had to admit to herself that it kind of sucked.

“Ow… ow… fuck… ow…” she groused, muttering and stepping as gingerly as she could.

_Why the fuck are there so many rocks in this grass all of a sudden? Rocks need to say buried in the dirt where they belong._

“Ow… ow…”

_Man, fuck these rocks._

Ten tired steps. Twenty. Almost thirty when suddenly the rocky patch was behind her and the ground was smooth and soft again. Her feet swished through the grass and she felt the green ribbons sliding between her toes. This was much better, almost as nice as the authors had described it. She smiled in relief and was shocked to learn that her face was sore. Muscles in her cheeks and around her eyes protested and she stopped smiling and let her face go mostly slack. A brief, muffled skirl of irritation formed in the back of her throat and slipped out through her nostrils.

_What a day._

A chilly breeze danced up from the sparkling creek below and to her right, and the girl hugged herself against the cold. She stooped and tried to keep her knees together. It wasn’t easy. And it didn’t keep much of the cold off her skin.

_What a shitty, shitty day._

It wasn’t just that she was naked. And scared. And unarmed. And as lost as she’d ever been.

_I’m all alone._

She felt a cold, sick fear swirl in her gut. Tears formed at the corners of her eyes and she tried her hardest not to think about the smothering sensation creeping over her.

“I’ll find him,” she whispered to no one at all. “Or he’ll find me.”

She swallowed. Despite almost drowning half a hour before, her throat was dry.

“I’ll find him. It’s gonna be okay.”

**. . .**

Ellie trudged along in silence, following the river, not knowing what else to do. The banks of the creek began to rise up around her, the hills growing taller, the forest decorating the top becoming farther away. She didn’t like the idea of being so far below the trees, unable to see anything around her, but the creek had carried her away from the farm. The creek would lead her back. Joel would be waiting. Everything would work out somehow. She just had to stick to the creek, keep her eyes open, listen for trouble, and don’t get spotted by bad guys.

Ellie sniffled. Her nose was a little runny. It wasn’t from tears, she told herself with a firm nod. It was just cold, that’s all.

_If I can’t see anything up there, maybe nothing up there will be able to see me down here._

She looked around again. Anything could be hiding behind any one of the trees and bushes that grew up the sides of the hills down here. Or watching her from the water. Did crocodiles live in water like that? They must, right? Cowboys and safari guys were always dealing with crocodiles and quicksand and snakes and angry natives and all kinds of shit that used to be cool when she was still safe behind the QZ walls and warm under the blanket of her dorm room bed.

_Fuck. I hadn’t even thought about quicksand. Good job, Ellie. That heart attack I’m gonna have in a little while needed a little bit of a boost, huh? Good work._

**. . .**

She couldn’t help but note that the water was almost pretty. A million tiny lights twinkled and danced down here at the bottom of this lush valley, shining off the surface of the liquid ribbon meandering through the green. Down here, it wasn’t like the gently sloping banks of the flatter lands near the farmhouse. Here the creek wound a path through a deeper valley carved out of tall hills. The weed-covered sides of the natural cleft weren’t sheer vertical walls, but they were very steep, probably unclimbable. She looked up at the swaying edges of the forest atop the hills, maybe fifty or sixty feet above her.

_The trees are losing their leaves. Winter’s gonna be here before you know it._

The thought wasn’t a comforting one to the naked girl.

_What if I get stuck out in the snow? I can’t even make a fucking fire. I’ll get frostbite…_

She thought of the Hello Kitty lighter in her backpack and how she might never see it again. Tears shimmered at the corners of her eyes again. She chuckled darkly and it struck her ears as a crazy, forlorn sound.

_Fuck. I’m so cold. I wish I had my lighter. I could be like the little girl with the box of matches in that story Sister Cecilia read to us when I was a kid._

_I preferred Sister Anne’s story. Lots of Dr. Seuss in her bag of books. But that little girl died warm, at least._

She sobbed suddenly. It wracked her body and she shook her head, trying to make the creepy thoughts tumble out. She snuffled, clenched her teeth and looked around, forcing herself to take in the sights. She’d never seen anything like this place.

It wasn’t the Grand Canyon or anything similarly breathtaking like the other photograph-worthy wonders that she had spent so many hours studying in her old, treasured copies of National Geographic, but it was the deepest valley she had ever been in.

“Cool,” she whispered in awe. If the birds chirping up there took any notice of her words, they gave no indication. Their bright, chirping chorus filled the warmer air up there and she smiled and repeated herself. “Cool.”

_Bet they’re gonna head south soon. Lucky guys. I wish I could fly with them. I bet it’s warm down south. Maybe I’d fly to Texas. Joel could meet me there. We could move into his old house and stay there until the spring… or maybe the summer. Yeah, definitely the summer. No point taking chances. Smarter to stay put till it’s warm. I’m sure we could find some way to pass the time._

She grinned, imagining all the things she and Joel could do with that much free time on their hands. Weeks. Months.

_That would be the good kind of naked._

Rounding a bend, she found herself suddenly in the shadow of an old railroad trestle, though she had no idea that was what the thing was. Any thoughts of flying south evaporated from her mind, pushed out by the sudden mystery before her.

“Woah, Nelly.”

A carefully spaced network of rows and columns of big wooden poles rose up from the water, bits of old garbage rippling and bobbing, gathered in clumps around the base of each round timber. Each column was larger than a telephone pole, all of them lashed to each other by an oddly patterned assortment of wooden planks – boards and poles all working together to hold up a strange and seemingly incomplete wooden bridge running along the top.

_Did I pass under this thing? I must have! Jeez. It’s lucky I didn’t smack into one of those big poles. It would’ve broke me in half if I’d hit one of those fuckers!_

She wanted to climb it, the boards were practically a ladder in places, making her way to the top of it, just to get a view of things above this valley. But as closely spaced and sturdy as the rough wooden planks were, it was all very old and her feet were very bare. The thought of giant splinters, long and cracked and needle sharp, driven into the tender flesh of her soles made her wince.

_Fuck, I wish I had some shoes. And some gloves too, probably. And rope. And a jet pack while I’m at it._

She walked closer to it, placing each foot carefully. No grass grew down here, beneath the ever-present shadow of this thing, only hardy little brambles and bushes, most of them losing their leaves now, shaped by the arrival of cool autumn nights into things that were more sharp, pointed branches than soft, friendly, puffy shrubs. Many of them had thorns and they scratched at her ankles and calves as she passed carefully between them.

_Hope you guys aren’t like venus fly traps or vampire plants or anything. I need all my blood, thanks._

She reached out and ran her hand carefully around the girth of one of the thick, round timbers that jutted up from the edge of the water, supporting the weight of the trestle. Old, dry, it smelled faintly of pitch. Long, slab-like planks crisscrossed the length of the thing and in-between it too, a zig-zag lattice of heavy boards holding it all together snugly with big, rusty nails. Old as it was, it hadn’t begun to sag yet. She looked up and squinted into the noonday sun that peeked around the rim of the structure high overhead. Across the top, the regularly spaced slats running the length of the span allowed shafts of bright sunlight to shine through. One of the warm rectangles of light fell across her, warping and bending itself around her body. It felt warm and wonderful.

Ellie whispered up at it. “What the hell is this thing for?”

_Why would you build a bridge with all those open gaps up there? Somebody could fall through those holes. And it would be hell on tires trying to drive over it. You’d get a flat or break an axle or something, wouldn’t you? How could you not? Why did they build something like this?_

In the shadow of the thing, the air was even colder, the dampness of the nearby water even more chilling. The naked teenager shivered and crossed her arms across her chest tightly. Her eyes remained fixed on the colossal mystery towering above her. It disappeared into the thick, obscuring green of the forest that rose up on either side of the steep hills marking the edges of the creek’s meandering path, cutting a cleft each way into the treeline up there, the ancient arboreal majesty forced to give way to whatever paths this strange bridge was meant to join, allowing it to cross over the depths of the little valley with the babbling creek and the clumps of trash at the bottom.

_How the hell would you even build one of these things? How many guys would it take? And how would you get all the wood and stuff out here? And where do you get poles that big? Those things are, like, a whole tree with all the branches cut off, pretty much._

She eased herself back into the warm rectangle of light and blinked rapidly.

_I wonder if Joel ever built anything like this?_

The twin steel rails affixed to the top, running parallel for an unimaginable number of rusting miles in both directions, couldn’t be seen from her lowly vantage point. Without that vital clue, the purpose of the strange, elaborate thing was fated to remain a mystery to her. She grimaced. She liked puzzles, liked putting the pieces together, figuring things out for herself. But this jigsaw of a bridge was missing too many pieces. She couldn’t make sense of it. She snorted in frustration

“Stupid fucking thing.”

**. . .**

The tattered polyester skin of the tent fluttered and flapped in the breeze. It wasn’t a little triangular pup tent like the one Joel had bought in Burlington, nor was it a big, squared-off cabin tent like the Winston’s, back in Boston. This one had been in the shape of a dome, judging from the thin, flexible metal ribs that the faded orange and black fabric still partially covered.

The campsite had been abandoned a long time. Scummy green rainwater filled a red and white Igloo cooler that had been left open. Little brown leaves floated in the nasty, still water. The fire pit at the center of the camp had seen a lot of use once upon a time, but now stubby little plants were slowly reclaiming the circle of dark earth ringed in by fist-sized rocks likely taken from the nearby creek. They poked up determinedly from the old layer of ash, small green shoots that would not be denied. Nature could be held at bay for only so long.

A wide, shallow, clear plastic bin, the sort that would fit under a bed, was behind the tent, lidless and filled with empty food cans, used up matchbooks, and other discarded pieces of trash. Whoever had lived here before had obviously intended to stay here a while and had planned accordingly.

There was a green duffle bag just inside the tent, peeking out tantalizingly from behind the ragged flap of what remained of the zip-up door. Denim and flannel could be seen inside the bag, so stuffed full of clothing that the sides of the container bulged and the zipper had to be left open to accommodate it all. A warped and splitting cardboard box of canned food and an autoloader shotgun with its walnut stock cut down to a duct tape wrapped pistol-grip propped against a blue milk crate of other survival gear, all easily within arm’s reach behind the duffle bag and next to the soaked, rotting sleeping bag patiently waiting for a vanished occupant that had never returned.

Ellie’s eyes greedily drank in the sight of the clothing. Her bare skin was drawn tight into goose flesh, barely keeping in the precious heat of her body. She licked her lips. Flannel. Denim. Cotton. Warm clothes.

_If only I wasn’t on the other side of this stupid fucking river._

Ellie balled her fists and grunted with annoyance. She ground the ball of her foot into the grass at the edge of the creek, her eyes narrowed and angry. The solution to half her problems was right there; clothing, weapons, food, all gathered into a nice little pile, not more than thirty feet away, but most of that distance was rushing water.

_Fuck, I gotta learn how to swim._

The girl sighed and resumed her trek north, leaving the old camp across the creek behind, abandoned and forgotten, tucked into the little hollow of the hill.

**. . .**

The ground was flatter here, the rise of the valley well behind her now, sloped away to almost nothing. Tall, whip-thin, greenish-brown stalks grew on either side of the little river. Wheat maybe, or hay or something like that, going brown and dry, reaching up towards the sun, swaying softly in the breeze, crops going dry and brittle, wanting to be harvested by farmhands long gone. The tips of stalks stood as tall as she was. Anything could be hiding in those fields, bounded with ancient, rusting barbed wire. Ellie eased away from the creepy field, inching closer than she liked to the hated riverbank.

_Rock and a hard place. Great._

_Will the wheat monster jump out and eat me? Or will the river try to swallow me again?_

Suddenly a flat thud, echoing through the distant forest and across the fields, almost lost to the breeze and the endless babbling of the water cutting through the farmland.

Gunfire.

A single shot. Ahead of her, but a long way away.

_Joel!_

She wanted to call out, to yell at the top of her lungs. But gunfire carried a long way. He could be miles and miles away. And something dangerous could be much closer. She had to stay hidden. She had to stay safe. The world was counting on her.

_I’ll find him. I’ll find the Fireflies._

_It won’t be for nothing, Riley. I swear. I swear._

She wiped at her cheeks, at the hot tears that had suddenly appeared there, leaving a muddy smear under each eye.

_I swear, Riley._

Her feet began to move faster, walking with determination, legs carrying her along with much less protest than before. She smiled. She was going to find him.

**. . .**

_God, this is just like that nightmare where I show up at Saturday morning drills without any clothes on and nobody tells me I’m naked until we’re lining up in ranks and Colonel Turner is pulling up in his fancy staff car to inspect the cadets._

_I had that stupid dream the night before every big test I ever took in that dumb school. Why the hell am I even thinking about that? That was just a dumb dream. This is real._

_Really embarrassing and really tiring._

Even taking into account the lamentable shortness of her exhausted stride, she was beginning to wonder just how far down the river she had been carried. Her mind was drifting, she was losing track of time.

She brushed her hair out of her face, noticing for the first time all the mud that was dried into her red locks.

_Shit! I’ve got mud in my fucking hair!_

She tentatively glanced down at the dried mud caking the front of her naked body, already beginning to crack and fall off in places. She looked glumly at the very bottom of her belly, at the junction of her tired thighs. She raised her arm, saw the stiffening mud there as well.

_Fuck me running, I’ve got mud in all my hair._

_So fucking gross!_

She sighed in disgust and disappointment, and kept trudging on.

_Glad this shit washes out easy. Don’t know what I would do if this were paint or glue or something._

_Fucking hell, how much further is it? I’m about to drop. Seriously. I’m pooped._

The fields were behind her. She was wrapped in on both sides by lush forest now. Birds in the trees were singing. Something cute and fuzzy scampered along in the underbrush of the forest floor. She tried to enjoy the sightseeing, but she just didn’t have any energy to spare. It was too bad. These woods were deep and secluded. The creek running along beside her sounded quite pleasant too, which was rather surprising for such a murderous body of water. But with all the water in her ears and her stuffy nose, she couldn’t fully appreciate the sounds or the smells. She blinked and took several steps with her eyes closed. She opened them again with noticeable effort. She couldn’t remember the last time she was so tired.

_Gotta rest… Just for a minute… Tired…_

She sat down, felt the warm grass beneath her rump, rested her head against her knees, her legs pulled up to her chest, and promised herself that she would not fall asleep. This was just a quick break to rest. That’s all.

**. . .**

The girl gasped and her head flew up with a start.

“Jesus!” She looked around, wild-eyed. It was still daylight. The sun was still where she had left it, more or less.

“Shit! Get it together, Ellie!”

She staggered to her feet and winced at how tender her soles had become.

“He’s not going to look for you all day,” she muttered to herself, brushing blades of dry grass from her butt cheeks. “If he thinks you’re dead, he’ll go back to Boston.”

She hesitated, her hands still on her ass. She could feel the tears forming again.

”No, he won’t,” she said firmly. “He won’t leave me.”

**. . .**

_Gotta rest again soon. Won’t fall asleep this time. Shouldn’t have fallen asleep last time, even it was for just a few minutes. Been walking for an hour, it seems._

The mud on her front had mostly flaked off by now, leaving a light brow patina on her naked torso, painting her from collarbones to knees. Her backside was warm in the sun. Climbing over the muddy ledge on her belly had kept the other side of her body relatively mud free.

_I’m gonna have the weirdest sunburn from this._

“Can’t I catch a fucking break? Just once?!” she shouted to the rain-heavy clouds drifting along silently high over her head. Frustration overtook her for a moment. She clenched her aching fists. “Gahhh!”

_Don’t know why I bother talking to you, God. You never listen. If you’re even up there. Fuck!_

Her muddy feet felt like they were made of stone and getting heavier with each step. She trudged a bit more and the silence snuck up on her. With all the water in her ears bubbling and popping with each plodding step, she didn’t notice it at first.

_The birds have stopped singing._

She stopped, hoping she would have the energy to start again in a moment. She crouched down, her muscles protesting all the way, and began to listen carefully. There was something… something pushing through the underbrush… snapping dry sticks, crunching across freshly fallen leaves… something was coming… lurching, fumbling.

_Oh God. Please, no. I don’t have anything left. I can barely walk._

Ahead of her, from between the trees running close to the shore, an infected emerged. Her stomach churned at the sight of it. A clicker. A boy, no older than her.

_He was too small to keep up with the pack._

_No. Those fuckers were on the other side of the river. He’s over here by himself. He’s all alone._

The sudden insight filled her with a sick pity.

The boy was only a little taller than her, with long, greasy brown hair hanging in tangled knots from his split open skull, pushed away from missing eyes by the layers of fungus growing out from what remained of his face. The thing was wearing fraying, ragged denim jeans at least three sizes too small and a t-shirt stretched too tight across a body that had outgrown it in the years since he had become infected. The shirt had been dark blue once, faded now to a dusty, powdery shade, bleached by the sun and the rain. A white, stylized cartoon of a dolphin danced across the taut expanse of his chest. Cracked, splitting letters spelled out “Sea World Orlando” below that. Ellie had no idea what the words meant.

She was as low as she could get without laying down. Her rump rested on her heels, one hand was between her legs, fingers splayed against the ground, holding her steady. With her other hand, she felt around in the grass surrounding her, hoping to find a rock, a bottle, anything.

The boy lurched forward on bare feet, caked in old mud, nails grown into talons. The treeline was at his back now, no longer blocking his echolocation. He thrust his head forward, jutting his swollen and blistered jaw out. His throat bulged with gathering air and he released it in measured amounts.

**Click… Click…**

He looked this way and that, his deformed head rocking back and forth spasmodically, searching, hungering.

_Oh fuck._

She tried to tuck her head between her shoulders, making herself just that little bit smaller.

He lurched along, popping his tongue against the split palette of his mouth. His rotting teeth were twisted, separating at the cleft where his sinus cavity had been sundered by the infection. His ears had heard her shouting and dutifully reported it to the cordyceps he served. He was hungry. The parasite inside him was eager to reproduce. The source of that noise would do well for either purpose.

She remained crouched, leaning very slowly to one side, searching for something useful. Her fingers found a rock, wrapped themselves around it, the ache in her knuckles, still scratched and sore by the roots that had saved her from the river completely forgotten in the fear of the moment.

She didn’t take her eyes off the boy, making her fingers judge the size and weight of the rock she had found. She measured its usefulness in her small hand. She frowned.

_It’s not very big, but neither is he. It might work. Or maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll go away._

It searched the bank with its sonar, looking for anything that might be the source of the earlier sound, the noise of life that had lured it here with promises of union or feasting.

Low to the ground as she was, Ellie didn’t quite have the irregular outline of a rock or a shrub. There was something tantalizingly symmetrical about her outline, silhouetted against the edge of the babbling creek, the rippling water sending sound waves around her body, curving and bending across her flesh, making her stand out as an intriguing silent shape against the endless white noise behind her.

Twice it clicked at her as she held her breath and prayed it would go the fuck away already. It paused, staring at her with eyes it no longer possessed.

_Go away._

It took a halting, twitching step towards her. The parasite in its brain told the body that there was something… just ten feet away… a shape… solid and fixed against the continuous babble of the water… a shape with what might be a head… a head with a warm and wet hollow inside… ripe and ready for a host…

“Guhhk,” it croaked in excitement, fingers flexing, hopeful.

It took another step, wanting to make sure. The water was close behind the shape. Water was death. Flesh was life. Its need was strong, not too dissimilar from the needs a teenage boy might possess were he still in possession of himself.

Another slow, careful step. Another.

_GO! AWAY!_

**ClickClickClick-k**

The shape flinched, the head atop it pulling down, withdrawing, retracting, trying to hide the precious warm space of its cranium from the fungal parasite. A womb to nest in, to grow, to spread again.

“GAAAHHHKK!” the boy screeched making her flinch, confirming what it suspected, sending him rushing forward, arms outstretched, reaching for her with splitting, filthy fingernails.

She whipped her arm, hoping her aim would still be true despite the soreness in her muscles. The rock tagged him, staggering him, but she had no follow up attack. There were no suitable rocks within reach. She beaned him with a dirt clod instead, the only thing her hands could find. No good. It only glanced off the thick fungal plates of his face, breaking apart in a shower of sod and small chips of white and yellow growth.

He shook his head, slowing but not breaking his stride and resumed his lurch towards her. She darted to her left, plunging into the forest, tired legs given a sudden burst of speed by the last stores of the adrenaline in her small body. Panting, terrified, she tried to lose him among the trees, weaving around the trunks, hearing him thudding and pounding his way through the forest, too close behind her but not gaining. The sticks on the ground caused her bare feet no end of misery. As she ran, dashing from tree to tree, she looked around wildly for something to use, but none of the multitude of branches on the ground were green wood. They were all too old, rotted and gone soft. A few crumbled apart with tired sighs as she stepped on them, falling into formless nothing.

The boy’s fingers were in the crimson edges of her trailing hair when she slithered between a pair of close trunks, the bark scraping her tender skin. The boy slammed into the coarse, implacable bark with an audible thunk. He howled but whether the noise was from pain or frustration, the girl couldn’t guess. She put several vital strides between them as he worked his way around the trees and resumed the chase.

_What do I do? What do I do?_

She was panting. So was he.

She knew that the infected didn’t rest, didn’t abandon a chase. They ran until their muscles failed, cordyceps unconcerned about anything as trivial as torn tendons. You couldn’t outlast the infected. No one could. She needed a plan. Brain working in a frenzy born of utter terror, she looked around wildly, arms raised, trying to shield her eyes from the thin branches slamming into her face as she ran.

_Fuck. Maybe I can climb?_

But most of the branches over her head were too small to take her weight. The few that might be large enough were too high for her to reach. Even if they had been, she knew her numb arms were too tired to do any more of that sort of work today. Further, she had never climbed a tree in her life. Who knew if she even could? And that rough bark wouldn’t be friendly to bare skin. Even if she managed to get up there, he would wait at the bottom, screaming and clicking. And others would hear the noise eventually and come to join him. Tears of frustration and rage began to slip from her eyes, tumbling in her wake as she ran, small drops of moist nourishment that fell upon a welcoming forest floor.

_Who wants die stuck up a damn tree anyway?_

Despite the prey’s best efforts, the parasite was gaining again. The prey was getting tired. The fungus was unflagging, driving the host body ever onward. The trees were stationary, prey wasn’t. The prey was the only thing moving in a world of fixed structures, impossible to miss. Easy to follow. The parasite fired neurons inside the parts of the brain that it had carefully preserved, commanding the boy to run, to follow, to hunt. Clothing too small constricted the boy’s movement. The sturdy, resilient jeans had distorted the development of his legs as he had grown taller through the first years of puberty in garments that had become a prison, deforming his muscles and making his body more difficult to control than normal for a parasite which never had quite as much finesse over the movements of a body as the original owner had. But it made do. Cordyceps always found a way to bend a host to its will. All it needed was time and time was all a body had once the infection ate the parts of the brain that made a person.

Ahead, a dozen steps, maybe a little more, the prey stumbled, cried out, almost fell. It kept running, recovering its balance, but now it was closer than before. Eight steps. Maybe ten. Soon. The body needed to feed. The spore wanted to spread. Which to do? Feed? Propagate? Like always, the parasite would let the moment decide. Either the prey would succumb or it would be wounded and get away. No matter which, a greater purpose would be served.

From just beyond the chamber made from the host’s ruined head, below the warm space housing the controlling, ensconced fungus, the boy shrieked in what surely must have been an expression of primal joy. The prey was making all the noise needed to find it, doing the parasite’s work for it. The sound the boy made wasn’t for searching. It could only be whatever passed for delight to a predatory mushroom. Adrenaline flooded the ravaged body, the first trickle of rewarding endorphins sending feelings of euphoria through him, a gift from his master. His body responded: muscles moving faster, heart racing, lungs pulling cool air down to through a swollen, sore esophagus to fill half-moldered lungs. An erection strained uselessly against the zipper of his jeans, though what little was left of the boy’s mind could not remember or understand the purpose of the tingling, yearning hardness. All he knew or wanted now was to attack and to feed or to spread the infection. Anything to please the master while it still had use of him, before he was too old and worn out, before it sent him in search of a dark, quiet place so that he might lie down and the master might find a final use for the boy in the fertilizing cradle of his dead body.

“GHHKK!” he screeched in joy, happy to hunt, to run, to rip and rend. Happy to still be of use. His erection, still a new thing to the body, throbbed with an abundance of pent up adolescent energy. When the moment to attack came, his body would ejaculate for the first time, adding a fresh stain to torturously tight denim already covered a variety of markings, and the joy of that sensation would mix wonderfully with the pleasure the master always let him feel in those moments when flesh was torn and screams assailed what was left of his ears. He lived to serve, a devoted animal with no understanding of himself. The master’s pleasure was his own. The master was all that mattered.

Ellie could sense how close the boy was. She wanted to curse but she was breathing too hard, too fast. There wasn’t time to make words. Her lungs needed air. All the air.

She pivoted tightly around a tree, using her hand against the bark to help her make the turn, darting to the side faster than the clumsy thing pursuing her could manage. Her ankle howled at her halfway through the turn but she ignored it. She had put another five or six steps between her and the monster with that tricky move. Her ankle would just have to shut up and deal with it. Like her burning lungs. Her aching knees. The godawful pain in her side. They all just had to shut the fuck up and deal with it.

More trees. More branches in her face. More running. Her legs were numb, her feet lead weights, her toes stubbed and bruised, bleeding. The pain in her side was almost enough to double her over. Her ears worked just fine and they dutifully informed her about the heavy, muddy feet slamming hard into the leaf bestrewn forest floor behind her – the sounds of a monster closing in again.

Her ankle threatened to buckle at any moment.

_Oh… God… no…_

The forest wasn’t giving her the edge the way she had hoped it would. She didn’t know where to go. She tried to focus on the sound of the river and moved as fast as she could still manage in that direction on stumbling, unsteady legs. She realized sickeningly that she was now almost as clumsy as the infected boy coming up fast behind her. She pivoted sharply again, twisting around another tree on her good ankle. She told her hand to come up, to grab the side of the tree to help her make the turn, but it wouldn’t listen to her. Her fingers brushed the bark lightly and she lost her balance.

She fell, tumbling out of the forest into the warm sun, rolling once, twice, scrambling up on hands and knees back across the grassy shore, towards the river. She was glad to feel the daylight on her skin again. The grass, so close beneath her, smelled clean and fresh in her nose. She smiled. The woods were nice. This wouldn’t be a bad place to die, really. Even on all fours, moving as fast as she could manage away from the trees, she was starting to wobble unsteadily, gasping, panting, reeling and lurching from side to side. She was spent.

_Get up… getupgetupgetup… C’mon Ellie…Up!_

Her knee struck a rock. She didn’t feel the pain. An old, dried, discarded snakeskin tangled itself around the fingers of her left hand as she pushed onwards into the tall grass. She didn’t notice it.

_Get up, Ellie! Don’t crawl! Run! You gotta run!_

_Why? What should I? No point now._

_GET THE FUCK UP, BITCH!_

It had been Riley’s voice. She hated when Riley yelled at her.

Ellie rose to her feet one more time, shuddering at the effort of it, ankle screaming at the injustice of it all, her wobbly, juddering body almost toppling over as she stumbled forward, only her raw momentum keeping her from pitching face first into the grass. Her hands desperately flailed out, pushing her away from the ground her fingers couldn’t feel.

_Click click click!_

Gasping, unable to catch her breath, she tried to groan but her busy lungs and her bone-dry throat wouldn’t let her make the sound. Her hands were limp at her sides, arms too tired to swing as she ran the last few steps she was going to take.

_Riley… please…_

The prey turned, its back to the river, facing the host as the boy it controlled careened clumsily out of the tree line, clicking and screeching, limbs never responding quite as well as they should, even after three years spent residing in his head. It had almost lost the prey when the small, still nimble form had pivoted again and cleared the treeline where it had fallen to its knees, crawling, a slower way to travel, better, nicer, easier to catch. The hunt was supposed to be at an end. But the sounds coming to the fuzzy, soon-to-fail ears of the boy’s body took shape in a repurposed part of the brain, telling the parasite that the prey was standing up again, swaying, panting, ready and inviting as it should be, wanting and needing the host’s touch, like all prey did. The fungus didn’t know and didn’t care that the prey was naked. The boy would have. It was irrelevant now if she was clothed or naked. She was alive. She was in good condition. She would make a good meal or a good host.

Long rivulets of drool dripped from the boy’s open mouth. He was breathing heavily. Needing. Craving. Ellie shivered at the sight and sound of him.

More endorphins flooded the host’s borrowed body, making the muscles tremble and the hard, forever unused member strain futilely, pointlessly against the cage of filthy denim. Once, just a few years, the boy would have enjoyed the sight of a nude girl, but he craved different things now. The master’s desires were all that mattered.

Ellie didn’t see his arousal. Her eyes were fixed on the thing’s face, on the dark maw from which the fungus sprouted. A mental image of a similar wrongness growing out of her own ruined face one day blipped across the back of her mind and she clamped her mouth shut against the incredible horror of it.

The boy reached for her, closing in carefully, not rushing, just as the parasite commanded. There was the sound of water dangerously close behind the prey. Water was death. Each step had to be slow and sure.

Ellie blinked rapidly, sweat making her eyes red.

_He’s kinda small. Maybe I can take him in a fight? Can’t go back into that water again. No shape for that. No shape for anything, really._

She tried to swallow but she found she had no spit left. She had no more adrenaline left either. Her muscles felt like wet, loose rope. She tried to raise her small fists, circling around on wooden legs, favoring her swelling ankle, the river to her right, the boy dead ahead. She didn’t think to keep the water behind her. She was too tired to think. Her body was shaking from a mixture of fear and fatigue. She felt herself getting drowsy. She tried to assume a rough approximation of Joel’s fighting stance, fists up, ready to punch. She didn’t have Joel’s power. She couldn’t do this the way he did. She would have to do this another way. She nodded to herself. She had seen it done another way. She remembered the night she and Riley had been on their way to see Winston and his horse. A straggler had crossed paths with them in an abandoned building. He stank of sweat and booze. He had made a grab for them. Riley had punched him in the throat. He went down coughing and hacking. They ran back to the dorms and spent the next week wondering if Riley had killed the man.

_Riley punched that fucker right in his fucking throat._

Ellie bared her teeth and prepared to do that too.

“GHUK-KK!!”

“…fuck …you,” she wheezed.

“Ellie!” Joel’s voice!

“Joel! Help!” Her voice was a frantic but faint croak. She barely heard her own words. She didn’t dare take her eyes off the monster, almost within arms reach now.

“Move, girl!”

He was somewhere behind her. Had she passed him on her way here? When? How?

“GET DOWN!!”

He was pissed. More than that, he was scared. She could tell by the tone of his voice. She spent a second trying to make sense of his words. It was so hard to think.

The boy squawked, lunged. Ellie fell over to the side, dropping gracelessly, hitting the ground in a limp pile of legs and arms, trusting Joel to get the monster before it got her. She curled up clumsily, defenselessly, burying her face in the bend of her elbow as she heard its shuffling in the grass, turning to face where she had fallen, its feet sliding about, much too close to her head. Standing triumphantly over her, it screeched and bent at the waist, reaching for her naked flank with vile, encrusted talons.

A familiar blast! His shotgun! The ratcheting metal sound of the pump being worked. A second blast! Something splattered, raining wetness and clumps down on her where she lay.

A heavy thump in the grass next to her, close enough to feel vibration of the impact and the woosh of air that it displaced as it arrived, so close that she could feel the heat of its body, near enough to hear the almost comical squishing sound of bowels releasing, constraining muscles relaxing in death. The indescribably foul smell of the thing filled her nostrils, choking her. She pressed her face deeply into the space between her bicep and her armpit, her small chin tucked in tightly just above her breast, and there she rested finally, safe and warm in the soft grass that cradled her.

“Ellie! You okay?” Closer, but still somewhere behind her.

Ellie smiled, too exhausted to speak or wave a friendly hand or even open her eyes.

_Knew you’d find me._

Only a bit past noon, more or less. A good time to take a nap. A siesta, as Tino liked to call them.

“Ellie!”

Blackness rushed over her and she welcomed it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ending to this chapter was originally quite a bit longer, but I trimmed a lot of it out in editing because I think the image of a napping Ellie, tired and naked and safe and having finally found Joel as he approaches her while she grabs a quick rest following the events of her big solo adventure (and this is turning into quite a run-on sentence!), was the best way to close this part of the story out. I’ll include the part that got cut out in volume four with all the other deleted content, whenever I get around to that. There’s some nice moments in there between her and Joel that serves as a nice callback to some stuff he told her about back in the first volume that I want to share with you guys, so look for it once I’ve put a big bow on the larger story with the conclusion of volume three.
> 
> Other things worth mentioning are Ellie’s memories of Saint Philomena’s orphanage where she grew up before transferring to the FEDRA prep school (in my canon, at least) and her recollections of Sister Cecilia, who read stories to them. The particular story Ellie remembers is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” a real downer of a story about a girl who meets a sad fate. Ellie also recalls Sister Anne, who has been mentioned in other chapters, preferred Dr. Seuss when story time came around. Would it be literary heresy to admit that I’ve never really cared much for Dr. Seuss? There. It’s out in the open now. I’m not taking it back. ;-)
> 
> Speaking of stories, we had the Little House on the Prairie books in my house when I was a kid. My sister LOVED them. I wonder if they still hold up? Hmmm. I think a trip to my local library is in the offing. (Yes, I have a library card. It’s 2014. Don’t judge).
> 
> Isn’t it strange that no infected kids are shown in the game? Would that have been too dark? I guess they wanted to avoid risking a harder rating than “Mature”. The way I see it, anybody younger than Ellie probably wouldn’t survive the infection long enough to move beyond the runner or possibly the stalker stage. I don’t know how a ten-year old’s body could survive long the ravages of the infection enough to become a little clicker. 
> 
> Gosh. This is a creepy line of thought, huh? I bet Dr. Seuss could find a way to make the adventures of a rompin’ stompin’ lil’ bloater a cute and fun read. That’s why he’s rich and I’m not.
> 
> You know what’s even creepier? It seems as though Cordyceps doesn’t give a damn about the clothing the host body wears. So that means that whatever they were wearing when they turned just sort of stays on. It frays and tatters and erodes away, never being removed until it finally just falls off the body. And we know the infected eat. If you use Joel’s hearing, you can see a guy get pulled down by a group of them in the first basement where you encounter them. They’re still eating him when you sneak past. The things aren’t zombies, they’re just people with a parasite. So that means the food eaten has to come out. And THAT means that the infected are standing around, twitching and moaning and pooping their pants all the time. Can you imagine how bad they must smell? Yeesh!*
> 
> And speaking of unbearable stenches, I’m off to my library. Assuming I don’t get shived by the ever-growing community of homeless people camping out around the computers and the copy machines, I’ll see you guys next Saturday for Chapter Twenty-One: Permit #181c - Miller.
> 
>  
> 
> *And I don’t even want to think about the red, chafed and cracked skin of all those poor clicker butts! Ick! Not enough diaper rash cream in the world!


	21. Permit #181c - Miller

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five months the outbreak has been ravaging the world. Despite the best efforts of the army and what remains of the government, the world they knew was coming to an end. A new way of living was needed. Joel and Tommy have a plan and the Austin Military Safe Zone doesn’t factor into it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is quite long, so get comfy. Also, it’s a day late, but what can I tell you? Christmas time is a joyous and busy, busy time. ;-)

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 21 – Permit #181c - Miller**

 

The day wasn’t getting any warmer. As they had gathered together outside the flapping, ramshackle tents in the pre-dawn twilight to board the bus that would take them to this work site, twelve miles outside the relative safety of the Allendale MSZ, Foreman Bellanger had assured them that today they wouldn’t need the heavy coats his crew usually provided on winter mornings. The light jackets and sweaters they were wearing would do. Anything heavier would just get in the way. The army meteorologists had assured him the night before that today was going to be the first day in a week-long warming trend. Texas winters never lasted long and this one was coming to an end today.

Tommy, working in the deep shadows of the shallow trench just a few feet away from his older brother, a broad brush in one hand, a pail of thick vegetable oil in the other, grunted in irritation, his breath forming a visible cloud, even this close to noon.

“Fuckin’ weathermen,” Tommy hissed, keeping his voice low as he hefted the wooden block, slotting the big supportive brace into place. “How the hell we ever gonna figure out the cure to this mess when we still can’t figure the goddamn weather?”

Joel grunted in agreement. His thin, red ‘Los Angeles Angels’ windbreaker did little to warm him. Down here, in the three feet deep furrow cut into the earth, tall poles holding up plywood walls fifteen feet high and five feet apart for one another on either side of the trench, the mold into which concrete would soon be poured, the daylight was mostly blocked off, sealing out the wind and most of the day’s heat with it. It felt like working inside a long hallway with no roof. Don, the guy working on the other side of Tommy had joked more than once about putting up some pictures, maybe laying down some carpet, putting in some furniture. It usually got a laugh from Tommy. Joel didn’t see the humor it in. Joel didn’t see the humor in much these days. The distant rippling pops of gunfire sounded again for what had to be the twentieth time today.

Tommy cursed softly. The shots were closer than they had been before. Enzo, making his way down the long, narrow tunnel with a bundle of tightly secured rebar over his shoulder, stopped and crossed himself quickly.

Don muttered to no one in particular, “Sonsabitches gettin’ closer all the time. They’ll be at the outer fence before the day’s out.”

“Dios guarde!” Enzo hissed. “Don’t say such things, Don.”

“Sayin’ it or not sayin’ it won’t change nothin’,” the other man replied with a groan, stretching his back, his hands trying to rub some of the stiffness out if it. His pail and brush rested by his feet. If it rested there too long, the guards would come to motivate him.

“Shut up over there,” the soldier standing at the opening of tunnel said. “And get a move on, old man. This wall has to be finished on time.”

“Yes, sir,” Enzo said, hefting the long rods of rebar over his shoulder again. The ends of the metal poles bounced lightly as he settled the load into place. “Look out, amigos. Coming through!”

Joel and the others pressed close to their respective walls, trying not to get their shirts wet from the walls they were coating while still making room for the man as he passed them in the narrow space that would soon be a high, concrete wall. The wall would be five feet thick at the base, making it a tight squeeze inside the confines of the plywood formation. Enzo’s boots thudded loudly on the concrete floor beneath them, a wider, reinforced base that had been poured weeks ago. Metal rods three feet high and evenly spaced jutted straight up from the floor, ready to support the concrete wall that would soon be poured in over the top of the temporary wooden wall above. The man threaded his way around the rods and the other men with practiced ease. Like them, he was an experienced construction worker. It was the reason he wasn’t forced to spend his days huddled inside one of the Military Safe Zones a few miles away, bored and hungry and packed practically shoulder to shoulder with other refugees, hoping the food wouldn’t run out, hoping the soldiers wouldn’t suddenly leave, hoping not to be forgotten by the unseen people in charge of what was left of this city.

“Major Gaines! Alpha Two Two reports goomba contact,” a soldier on the other side of the temporary plywood wall shouted, her voice muffled somewhat by the barrier between her and the construction workers. Corporal Janet Caparo, barely two years in the army and a long way from her home in the panhandle of Florida “Caught out in the open crossing Mansfield Park. At least thirty of the bastards! They’re cut off, sir. Got their backs against Lake Travis. They’re holding the goombas off, but it’s a four-man team, sir. Recon. On foot. Their third encounter today, sir. Ammo’s gonna run out soon.”

Another long volley of distant gunfire, surely from the trapped patrol, added weight to the corporal’s words. The officer, Major Gaines, was well known to Joel and his crew. Gaines was in charge of this site and seemed to have command over most if not all of the MSZs in Austin. The man had a voice like a foghorn and it bellowed now, like it so often did at this work site.

“Shit, Caparo! Alright… Um… Okay. Listen up. There’s a bird over Comanche Point. Get ‘em on the line and tell ‘em we have troops in contact and needing support. We can’t afford to lose another patrol and we _cannot_ have a damn toadstool town sprouting up that close to this wall.”

“Yes, sir!” she responded and began to speak military code into her radio. From inside the wooden walls, Joel couldn’t make out her words. He couldn’t see the map she was studying either, unfolded across the hood of a Humvee and held down at each corner with M4 rifle magazines.

“Mansfield Park?” Tommy whispered. “Ain’t that the big park the bus drives by every mornin’ on our way here?”

“Yeah,” Joel said as discretely as he could, continuing to work all the while. He was the man nearest to the soldier watching over them.

A solid, echoing thump. Too far away to feel the vibration in the ground, but the sound was a familiar one these days: a grenade. More gunshots followed, distant enough to sound less like rifles desperately spitting death and more like a long string of firecrackers celebrating down the street during a neighborhood Fourth of July cookout.

“What’s going on?” Hector asked quietly, coming up behind them from further down the canyon between the walls. He was another construction worker, part of the same team working on this project. He had a big bucket of dirt in each gloved hand, making his way carefully to the end of the makeshift fortification to dump it out into the bed of a waiting truck.

“Soldiers fighting a big mess of infected ‘bout a mile south of here,” Don said. “Outnumbered and about to take a swim in the lake.”

“Dios mío!” Hector muttered, his mouth a grim line beneath his moustache. Construction workers were not allowed to carry weapons and every man here knew that the soldiers considered them expendable. They knew what would become of them should the order to retreat be given.

Close behind Hector and likewise carrying two large, five-gallon buckets of dirt, his younger, taller cousin Landeros curled his mustachioed lip contemptuously and spat at the ground. The big, surly man gave the impression that he didn’t speak much English, but he often seemed to understand more than he let on.

Joel said nothing and continued to apply a protective coat of vegetable oil to the smooth surface of the long planks of marine grade plywood, brushing it on thickly, the second of at least three coats. When the concrete was poured in a few days from now, the oil would allow the wooden wall to be removed cleanly once the thick, gray mixture inside was dry and ready to stand on its own.

Joel took his time with it, making sure not to miss any spots. No point in building a wall unless you built it right. And he was in no hurry to finish the job anyway. Life inside the fence of the overcrowded Allandale Military Safe Zone was no picnic. Every day, infected people came sprinting down the empty streets, rushed headlong into the chain link fences that had been hastily emplaced around the few blocks that comprised the Safe Zone. They would scream and claw at the steel fence, driven to frothing rage by the parasite inside their heads, shredding their fingers and sleeves and cheeks trying to reach through the razorwire-topped fence, until the soldiers in Humvees arrived to put them down and burn their bodies with diesel fuel so the stalks and spores wouldn’t sprout from the rot. Day and night they came. The first month inside the fence had been a sleepless one for everyone. Now most of the people here had learned to sleep in ten and twenty minutes bursts, gathering rest in whatever sad little scraps they could at any hour of the day or night. Joel was tired. They all were. Only the lucky ones in the two or three really large compounds slept well. The smaller MSZs were too little to get far enough away from the gunfire and the screaming to sleep peacefully.

Another smattering of faraway rifle shots echoed around inside the plywood tunnel and Joel grunted in irritation. It was easier to ignore than it had been when they began work here two months ago, but it still had a way of making the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He wondered if he was ever going to get entirely used to it. Tommy talked sometimes, when they were laying in the gloomy darkness of their crowded room in Allandale, of his hopes that the world would return to normal soon. That somebody would put two and two together somewhere and figure out how to beat cordyceps so they could take the world back. Joel was tired of hearing Tommy’s flights of fancy. This was how the world was now and it might be like this forever, for all he knew. The Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization and God only knew who else kept coming up empty every time they announced they were once again on the verge of finding a cure. Trials and tests and broken promises, over and over and over. Joel was sick of hearing it. Tommy and some of the other guys sat around the TV whenever they weren’t on a job for their bosses at FEMA-turned-FEDRA to watch the news from the few places still beaming signals up to the satellites and waited and watched and got their hopes up again and again for no damn reason. Joel preferred to sleep when he got the chance and if he couldn’t sleep then he tried to think of ways to get him and his baby brother the hell out of this place before those half-assed fences outside the window finally fell down for good. Things weren’t going back to normal and the sooner Tommy accepted that, the better.

Joel dipped his brush in the thick oil and considered the unspoken truth of the bustling worksite around him.

This place they were walling up would be large enough to hold a few hundred people comfortably. So comfortably that they could sit behind this big wall and pretend the world around them was back to normal. Once the wall was done, of course. Once Joel and Tommy and the other guys had finished it. Once they had been dismissed from this job and bussed back to Allandale, probably for last time.

Joel knew he would never see the inside of this wall once he was done here.

The people who would eventually live inside, in the future site of the Hudson Bend Military Safe Zone would need a big, solid wall like this one to keep them safe from the hell going on outside. Surrounded on three sides by the waters of Lake Travis and the Colorado River, the little town nestled inside the low hills of this cozy peninsula would make a very good home for the very important families currently huddling in places not much better than secured areas that people like Joel and Tommy and the other guys lived in, relegated to the very squalid shelters of a half dozen smaller, less pleasant Safe Zones in and around Austin, packed in among the less important families. None of the Safe Zones were very nice, but a few were halfway decent. For the FEDRA administrators and a select group of others, something better was required for long-term housing. The list to get into Hudson Bend was short and only the names of the very well connected were on it, and not even all of that small number of elite made the cut. Rumor was people were willing to kill (or pay others very handsomely to kill on their behalf) to remove certain names on the list and free up a few more precious slots for the ones who had almost but not quite been accepted. Or so Joel had heard from Matt Fletcher, a local smuggler and information broker who seemed to have the ability to get through any checkpoint.

Technically, people like Matt were “shoot on sight” looters according to army regulations during this time of military rule, but Matt was keeping the pampered FEMA reps and high-ranking military officers here supplied with all the little niceties the army considered too frivolous or too fragile to include in the cargo bays of the increasingly irregular supply planes still making their way to Austin. Matt Fletcher delivered the goods, so the guards were encouraged to look the other way as he passed through their checkpoints. The small gifts of candy bars and sodas that Matt slipped to the soldiers at the gates usually helped too.

Joel had a meeting with Matt soon. They had very important business to discuss.

High overhead, a large jet circled lazily across the sky, tracing a chalk white mark against the cerulean backdrop set between the frames of the high, plywood walls. Joel studied it discreetly, knowing what it meant. Supplies, finally. Maybe out of Houston? Or possibly San Antonio? The cargo plane had come up from the south a few minutes ago and was now burning precious fuel while a runway was made ready at the big airport a few miles east of the site. There was no way of knowing what kind of cargo the plane carried, but whatever it was, a single planeload of anything wouldn’t be enough to meet the needs of the many Safe Zones hanging on to life in Austin. The shortages weren’t bad, not yet. But it was sure to get worse from here. Joel suspected that was the main reason that finishing the construction of this new MSZ had become such a high priority. Once it was complete, there would be no shortages inside this wall. The local office for FEDRA was going to be located here, he’d seen them bringing in equipment aboard vans still bearing the old FEMA logo. This was where the bigwigs were going to live. The other zones in Austin would have to make do with scraps once this place was completed.

The asshole at the end of the shallow trench checked his watch to reassure himself that he wasn’t going to let these civvies have one more minute of rest than orders permitted. Satisfied that it wasn’t so much as a single second too early, he began to bark at them. Barking was the only language Private First Class Barathan seemed to know.

“Break! Lunch break! Let’s go! Get out! Lunch break! One hour!” He held his rifle by the forestock in his off hand and motioned with his other hand for them to file past, his gestures short and quick, hinting at violence, like his words. Barathan was still a teenager and enjoyed having authority over men who reminded him of his fuckwad of a father. “Come on! Out! Out!”

Of the eight men who made up the work team assigned to this section of the wall, Joel was the first to step up and out into the warm sunlight and the cold breeze. The heavy, thumping sound of the dark green Apache gunship’s blades chopping through the air as it roared south directly above him didn’t draw his attention like it did with his younger brother, just a few steps behind. Joel’s eyes were on the people milling around the crowded construction site. Bounded along the south, across most of the east to west stretch of Ranch Road 620 by a hastily assembled barricade of stacked sandbags, barbed wire fences, closely parked city buses, and as many of the low, portable concrete barriers that Jerry called ‘Jersey Walls’ as the military had been able to scrounge up, the site had transformed from one several evacuated little peninsulas in Lake Travis to a rather busy small town, it’s inhabitants a mixture of soldiers and civilians. In that way, this place was akin to the collection of Military Safe Zones scattered throughout Austin. But this place was different. Here people moved with a purpose. They didn’t stand around with nothing to do, hungry and bored, with no way to pass the time productively, a people who found themselves more the prisoners of the soldiers than a citizenry being protected by them. Here, where the peninsula joined the mainland, in the unnamed temporary town at the heart of this construction site, there was hope, of a sort.

From sunup to sundown, the place was a beehive of human activity, with soldiers and skilled civilians coming in by the busload from the various MSZs to build the enormous containment wall needed to seal this place safely off from the rest of the city. There was a wire fence inside the outer, ad hoc fence, and another fence on the north side of the site, in case the patrols had missed any infected or dangerous survivors hiding out in the small, formerly upscale town at the center of the peninsula. That seemed unlikely. The place was patrolled every day and so far no threats had been found since the first teams went in to check the place out, door to door, and street by street, thorough, in the way you had to be to survive today. Sending men in every day might have seemed a waste of time to some, but there was no point in taking risks. A determined person could stay hidden in those hills and houses if they tried hard enough – determined loners like that were always a threat, even now, with most of the city overrun, a few cuckoos were still out there, scraping by on their own despite the army’s best attempts to locate them.

The more Joel thought about it, the more he came to believe that the safety of that particular assigned patrol was probably something of a reward for the tired fire teams exposed to the constant dangers of what lay beyond the southern fence, in the indescribable hell of what had been the once-pleasant Austin suburbs. He had lived in a nice little suburb before the outbreak, on the other side of Austin, in a nice two-story somewhere in the general vicinity of that helicopter’s path. He had never liked living in the city. He was a country boy at heart. Joel wanted out of this place.

There were maybe four hundred people here today, give or take, working hard or supervising the work. Only fifty soldiers or so would remain when the sun went down and it got too dangerous to work. Those men assigned here permanently lived in odd, boxy portable homes they called “choos”. Probably an acronym of some sort, though Joel couldn’t guess what it was short for. The army loved their acronyms. And those “choos” looked a damn sight more comfortable than the crowded church Joel shared with his brother and a bunch of other single men, sleeping each night on a hard row of pews, somebody’s head just below his feet, somebody else’s stinky feet so close to his head that Joel could feel the warmth radiating from them. He missed having his own bed, his own home, his own space. Joel wanted out of this place.

The ramshackle outer fence ran for almost a mile in each direction. It was constantly patrolled. The infected were a never-ending threat, of course. But the real problem lately was stragglers, the small groups of survivors who hadn’t wanted or hadn’t found a place inside the security of the MSZs. Somehow they continued to survive without army protection. At first, Joel had thought they were crazy – who on earth could be so damned foolish as to think they could make it on their own out there, right? He and Tommy had sought the safety of the Del Valle Triage Center as soon as it had set up shop in the shadow of the airport. But weeks had gone by, then months. Hell, it was February now, winter was almost over, and those survivors were still out there, still scraping by, not coming and going according to the army’s plans, not letting men in gas masks and body armor split their families up to accommodate numbers on a roster put together by office clerks that cared nothing for the people those assigned numbers represented. Those people outside the walls stayed together, for better or worse, and a lot of them were getting by somehow. Joel saw it, no matter how much the official propaganda from FEMA insisted otherwise. Tommy and some of the others had noticed as well.

Anyone not army or not FEMA was just a number now, no different than any other number listed on the rolls. If those people out there could make it without the help of the government, then other people could too. Joel didn’t want to be a number waiting to be erased. Joel wanted out of this place.

“Let me see your card,” Private Barathan growled as Joel was about to pass him.

You had to show your card all the time here, even if they knew your face. You showed your card when you got on the bus, when you got off the bus, when you went into the trench, when you came out of the trench, when you went to the shitter, when you got back on the bus. There was probably some reason for the constant checks, some change the army psychiatrists hoped to affect in the civilians over time, a subtle grinding away at the subconscious designed to make them more docile and compliant, more willing to obey the orders of their army handlers.

Joel wore his laminated card around his neck on a nylon lanyard. He never took it off. No one here did. The card has his number printed on it. The number was who he was now.

“Permit #181c, Miller. Construction,” Joel said in a monotone to the soldier doing the headcount.

Behind him, Tommy has his card out too, attached to an identical lanyard. Standard issue, it came attached to the plastic card holder given out with the ID card.

“Permit #73c, Miller. Construction,” Tommy said, holding the card up as he passed the soldier.

“Permit #75c, Webber. Construction,” Don said as he passed the guard in turn. Joel barely heard it. He was making his way to the break area. He had an appointment to keep.

The break area was just a large open space away from the worksite and “choos” and the mobile homes that made up the army camp and the foreman’s shack. It was a little too hilly there to place a building or to land a helicopter, so it had gone unused. A few workers had started to take their breaks there, when the weather was nice enough, and over a week or two, it had become something of a picnic area.

The first of several pickup trucks were rolling out of the decontamination area just inside the southern gate between the two tall, skeletal steel towers that served as sniper nests. The welded together structures perched high atop afforded a great view of the terrain beyond the fence but the thin aluminum plates didn’t offer much protection against incoming bullets. One soldier had been killed up there last week, shot in the head by an unseen hunting rifle. Work had stopped for two hours after that. It had taken the patrols an hour to find the dirty, disheveled hunter (or possibly some hapless nobody the patrol pinned the attack on – who could say for sure) and brought him back for execution. Major Gaines, the head honcho here, had ordered his soldiers to burn the straggler alive, standing him up in a stack of old tires in the middle of the main road across from the southern fence for all to see, a brutal message to discourage any more attacks against the army. So far, no one had dared to shoot at them again. Old-fashioned warning signs just weren’t cutting it anymore, apparently. Gaines might have been a monster if judged by the standards of the world before the outbreak, but his tactics were effective.

Two of the battered, squeaking trucks turned off from the rolling convoy and began to bounce and rattle their way to the break area near that end of the site, droplets of decontaminating bleach water and fungicide flying from the wheel wells and underside. The one trailing behind suddenly pulled to the left, going wider than necessary to avoid a tree, and accelerated, passing the lead truck, almost scraping his fender against the first truck’s bumper. Miguel, the old guy behind the wheel of the second truck, made it seem like an accidental thing, as though he were just another driver out here, eager to get some hot food to other working guys like him, men who were ready for a break and a bite to eat – provided they had the money, of course.

“Sorry! Sorry, buddy!” Miguel said from his open window to the driver of the truck that was now in his wake, his hand clamped down tightly to hold his battered cowboy hat in place against the wind. “My fault, Lou! My fault!”

Lou, the man in the other truck, gave Miguel the finger and turned his steering wheel to take his truck to one of the other clusters of men waiting to grab a bite to eat. Other food-laden trucks were rambling along behind Lou and Miguel, more than ten in all. There were almost a dozen work teams here, clustered together where they stood in the field, self-sorted by their assigned tasks, waiting eagerly for the food trucks.

Miguel knew Joel and the others would be in the far corner of the picnic area. He had to be the one to sell food to them today, even if it meant putting a dent in his beloved old Ford F-150, his chocolate-colored beauty, a poor replacement for his wife, Anna, who was half as brown as the truck but so much more pretty to look at. She had been dead three months now, killed not by the fungal brain infection but by a bad case of strep throat that the medics at the triage center didn’t treat properly because a shortage of antibiotics forced them to focus on younger patients who could be of more use when they returned to health. It turned into Rheumatic fever and her heart failed. His beautiful Anna had a big heart, but like all the women in her family who tended to die young, it wasn’t a strong one.

Jerry, the man riding in the back with a gasmask worn on his head like a hat and a crowbar crusted with dried blood in his hand, thumped the roof of the cab with the edge of his fist.

“Easy, amigo! If I fall out, I’m taking the cashbox with me!”

“Sorry, Jerry!” Miguel laughed. He could see that Joel and his team were gathered in a nice cluster as far away from the other groups as they could manage without drawing attention. The plan was going to work and his truck had come through the near miss without a scratch. Truly, God was on his side today.

The big brown Ford squealed softly to a stop, still dripping a little from the sprays of the decon teams, and Jerry eased himself over the side. The older man had a bad knee, a reminder of when he was younger and dumber, he said. He dropped the tailgate of the truck and pulled the milk crates full of foil-wrapped food and the big insulated cooler into place. Miguel swung his legs out of the cab with a grunt. His joints were beginning to stiffen with age but he still had several good years left in him. He didn’t bring the gasmask lying on the dashboard. It was safe to walk around inside the fence. The army decontamination teams were tireless and thorough.

“Step right up, folks,” Jerry said from beneath his comically oversized moustache, gone iron gray with age, gasmask still strapped atop his head, keeping his bald spot safe from sunburn. “Lunch is served.”

The men paid for the food in cash, using dollars they received from the FEMA handlers at the end of every workday, after the buses brought them back to Allandale. Miguel and Jerry accepted the money eagerly. It still bought stuff from the hangar-turned-army supply depot / commissary at the airport, though it didn’t seem to go as far as it had a month ago and there were fewer and fewer items for sale each time he visited too. The things that were still being stocked were becoming more expensive, and now that FEDRA was running this show, no one knew if they would keep issuing dollars. How much longer were these small green rectangles going to have any value? Already, prices were spiraling out of control. Only a few merchants in the black markets would accept dollars anymore. Bartering for hard goods was becoming the backbone of the new economy. Even FEDRA and the army were finding it easier to deal with local, enterprising scavengers than trying to get what they needed through the official supply lines.

As though summoned by their thoughts, Matt Keller appeared at the gate.

His big, imposing red and silver F-350 super duty pickup truck wasn’t clean like the other trucks that had arrived a few minutes earlier. It was dented and dirty, metal bars welded across the windows in protective slats, short poles forming a perimeter of rusting barbed wire around the bed, jutting up jaggedly from the slots that would normally provide the mounting points for a camper shell. There were two new bullet holes in the fender that hadn’t been there the week before. Dried blood was spattered across the thick, steel bumper and smeared across one of the large headlamps and the homemade wire cage that protected it. Every time Joel saw that truck, it reminded him of something out of that old movie “The Road Warrior.”

Filing out from the guard shack, soldiers in white protective gear walked to the truck as Matt climbed out for inspection. They kept their rifles ready and Matt’s holster was noticeably empty when he raised his arms. The soldiers pressed small squares of special detection paper to his bicep, his shin, and the back of his neck. When they were satisfied he wasn’t carrying the hated spore, he was allowed back into his truck. Before he closed the door, he handed the men a few cans of Dr. Pepper. They nodded and waved him through.

On the other side of the gate, he pulled his truck to stop in the same wet patch of grass where Miguel and the other vendor trucks been a few minutes before. More men in masks and thick, cumbersome white suits came out from another shack. These men carried two-gallon sprayers slung from their shoulders by sturdy nylon slings. They had worked the handles of the built-in compression pumps before leaving the shed. The jugs were already charged, so they went to work quickly, using the flexible hoses and long wands to fog the tires and wheel wells with a fine mist of fungicide and bleach water. They weren’t sparing in their use of the mixtures. An outbreak of cordyceps inside the fence couldn’t be allowed. They sprayed the bumpers, the fenders, the underside of the truck, anywhere that might have picked up the spore. When they were done, Matt opened the door again (the bullet-resistant window he had installed didn’t roll down and the slats of the armored cage over the plexiglass plate was too tightly spaced to get a hand through), and handed each of the men a can of Mountain Dew. They took the bribes openly and nodded, waving him out of the decontamination area.

Matt had arrived alone, without the kind of military escort that accompanied Miguel and Lou and the other officially sanctioned vendors bringing supplies from kitchens and canteens of the various MSZs to this important worksite. Matt and his unlisted, uninventoried supplies were strictly “off the books”, but people like him were becoming vital to keeping the MSZs going. In the last two months or so, Matt and others like him had begun to appear in Austin. First a bold few, daring to bribe their way into the fenced-in holding zones just inside the gates, and now even more of them, almost twenty trucks like this one could be seen going from zone to zone, dawn to dusk, driving up and down the streets with whatever goods they had scrounged up in the abandoned towns outside the city for sale to anyone who could afford them. Word was that in the more fortified places like Houston, scavengers were still shot on sight. But in Austin, where official supplies were becoming scarce, the folks in charge were smart enough to look the other way. For now, at any rate. Matt Keller was under no illusion that being a one-man scavenger operation was somehow a career with a future, but it beat the hell out living in the human chicken coops known as the Military Safe Zones.

Free to move about the worksite now, Matt made a beeline for Foreman Bellanger and the three soldiers who were loitering around a Humvee near the “choos” and the foreman’s shack. Major Gaines wasn’t around at the moment, but Master Sergeant Schuler and Lieutenant Robinson were the next highest-ranking soldiers on site. The third solider was a radio operator, a corporal, Joel thought, but he couldn’t recall her name. It didn’t matter. Matt was a pro. He never looked in the direction of Joel and the others waiting to meet with him in the break area thirty yards away. His eyes were only for the important people on this site, the bosses. He gave away no hint of the plans he and Joel had carefully put together these last few weeks as he rolled along towards the foreman and the small cluster of important soldiers around him.

Another helicopter, an orange and black one sporting the logo of a local TV news station, circled the worksite from the east. It had been commandeered months ago and was most likely carrying FEDRA people now. Joel knew that it was too valuable an asset to leave in the hands of anything as trivial as the press. They would report the news they were given to report, any deviation from that was a one-way ticket from the comfort of the central MSZ to one of the overcrowded, underfed outer zones.

Bellanger looked up at, suspecting the same thing as Joel. His FEDRA masters were up there, taking a look at site, making sure work was being done. Just his rotten luck that they would pick lunchtime to do a flyby.

Matt opened the door of his big truck and hooked a thumb at the contents of his truck bed as he climbed down, using the running board as a step. If he suspected FEDRA was watching from on high, he gave no indication he was worried. As the foreman approached, Matt left a six-pack of Budweiser in the grass for Bellanger to collect later.

The men making the trade were too far away from the break area where Joel stood to hear what they were saying. The foreman walked around the truck, saying something and inspecting the cargo, staying clear of the rusty barbs that fenced it in. He handed Matt a square, leather tool bag, about the size of a bowling ball, filled with something unknown, and pointed his finger across the field at Joel, who couldn’t hear the words but recognized the shape of his name on the foreman’s lips. Matt nodded.

The helicopter departed, heading off in the same direction as the pair of long-gone black hawks from earlier. Bellanger collected the beer.

Joel ran the checklist in his head as he waited for Matt to finish his business with Bellanger. Miguel had a truck. Matt had a truck. One more truck and they were set. She should be along soon. Matt’s presence was her excuse to visit the site, as usual.

While the foreman inspected the cargo, Matt ambled over to Lieutenant Robinson and Sergeant Schuler, smiling and making small talk; making no effort to hide the bottle of whiskey and the handful of Hershey bars he gave them. The sergeant handed Matt a stack of rifle magazines as discreetly as he could. The officer and the young soldier with the radio set made sure to look away as the exchange was made.

Matt told them something that made them laugh, something from his impressively large collection of jokes, no doubt, and climbed back into his ride, the engine still running, a habit that Matt had gotten into on his dangerous excursions on the outside. A minute later, he brought his big brute of a truck to a stop near the grass where Joel and his work crew were sitting. Joel and Don rose to meet him. The others remained seated. They were tired and happy to let the more experienced guys handle the transaction.

“Got a load of stuff here, Joel. Bossman Bellanger says to give it to you and Don.” Matt was smiling, friendly like always, as he spoke. If that asshole, Private Barathan, were watching from his post near the trench, sixty yards away, the soldier would see nothing suspicious; no sign of illegal escape plans being made. Matt was a pro at stuff like this.

Knowing that he would be here for a while, the affable scavenger killed the engine and climbed down from the high cab of his maroon and chrome F-350 truck. He walked around to the tailgate and carefully unhooked the catches of the barbed wire fencing and pushed it aside before lowering the gate. The cargo space was filled with heavy rolls of strong wire mesh, reinforcement for the construction of the big wall, still wet and glistening from the misting of the decon team. At the foot of the rolls, several white cardboard cases of Wesson Oil, holding four one-gallon jugs apiece, were tucked in neatly and held in place with vinyl cargo netting. The boxes had been swiped from a Sam’s Club, judging from the blue diamond logo printed on the plastic wrapping. When the netting was pulled away, Joel saw that one of the bundles had a little, sticky pool of partially dried blood on it. Matt saw Joel looking at it and spoke reassuringly.

“People blood,” he said. “Not infected. Just some asshole that thought he was the new emperor of Sam’s Club. He and I had to figure out which one of us was gonna wear the crown, you know?”

“Which one?” Joel asked, shooting Tommy a look, using the unspoken language of brothers to tell him to get off his ass and help unload this damn truck.

“The one off 34 and 190, up at Temple,” Matt replied, helping Don and the two brothers slide the rolls of wire out onto the grass. “Still lots of good stuff there. Back in October, FEMA put up their signs and strung some tape across the door, but I’m pretty sure they forgot all about it. Nobody goes there but me since they closed it up.”

“The one not too far from that golf course?” Don asked. Golf had been his only escape from his wife and kids before the outbreak. They were gone now, killed by infected neighbors while he was trapped at a big worksite more than a hundred miles away, every street and every highway from Wichita Falls to Oklahoma City blocked by bumper to bumper traffic and military roadblocks as the sun went down. He had been talking to his little boy on the phone, telling him everything was going to be okay when his wife began screaming from the backyard. She’d gone outside even though he told her to say inside. She’d gone out there to get the stupid family dog and bring her in for the benefit of her worried kids. Why didn’t she stay inside? Why did she never listen to a damn thing he said? The boy had dropped the phone. He was ten, old enough to feel that it was his job to protect his mom. Don didn’t know for certain, but he imagined the boy had grabbed his aluminum softball bat on his way through the kitchen. That damn thing had cost more than three hundred dollars, but his boy had been absolutely thrilled to get it for Christmas. Softball was that boy’s whole world. He wouldn’t have run to defend his mom without his trusty bat. More screaming had followed, horrific and desperate sounds. Then silence. Nothing. No dog. No wife. No son. Not even the sounds of his five-year-old daughter, probably crying quietly and hiding somewhere upstairs, under the skirts of her frilly bed, clutching that silly stuffed frog she told all her best secrets too, hiding and crying and telling herself that her daddy would be home to protect her very, very soon, just like Mommy had said. Don had listened to the silence for almost three hours, until the battery on the phone finally died. He sat on a pile of sod, surrounded by the other men of his work crew trying to get an open line to their own families. Don sat unmoving, like stone, listening to a dead line and repeating his little girl’s name over and over until the word became a nonsense sound in his mouth. The sky was dark, blue-black, when the phone had finally slipped numbly from his fingers. Five months ago and he still didn’t know what had become of his daughter.

Don blinked harshly and studied the cargo spread out on the brittle, yellow-brown grass, focusing on the job, and only the job, like he did every day now. Joel’s eyes were on the rifle holder affixed to the floorboard in the space between the two front seats. It held a big, black Mossberg shotgun, the kind with the extended magazine tube for riot work – a policeman’s shotgun. A full-sized, older model AR 15 rifle was laying on the dashboard, the half-dozen loaded magazines that Sergeant Schuler had given Matt piled casually next to it. A wicked little submachine gun of some kind was resting on the passenger seat, a trio of magazines for it and a leather bag filled with cash, a dozen or more red flares and three new packages of round gasmask filters were next to it. The mask itself, an army issue M40, was in a durable, green nylon bag lying across the quartet of cup holders, holding down several folded maps. A big, shiny revolver hung from a brown leather shoulder holster under Matt’s left arm. A compact 9mm Glock 26 was in the back pocket of his Levis. Civilians weren’t allowed to have weapons now that martial law was in effect, but the army was content to look the other way regarding the “tools of the trade” needed by a few talented scavengers like Matt, so long as the bribes kept coming. Joel hoped the lanky blonde man had more guns stashed somewhere else. They were going to need them.

“Cargo’s already paid for. But tips are always appreciated, fellas.” Matt grinned, taking off his baseball cap to run his fingers through his damp, thinning hair. The cap was purple and white, stained yellowish around the base of the brim from old sweat. Across the front, it read ‘Don’t yell at me. I’m a volunteer!’

Miguel smiled and handed the Matt a chocolate and peanut protein bar while Jerry poured him a cup of Gatorade from the cooler. Matt reached into the backseat of his cab and produced an unopened box of Little Debbie swiss rolls, twelve cakes inside, still wrapped and not too stale yet.

“Mostly fresh, Miguel. Been saving them for you. I owed you for that canister of Kool-Aid last time. Those kids over at Windsor Park were glad to get it.”

“How much did you charge ‘em?” Tommy asked from his spot where he sat in the grass, almost half of a bean burrito stuffed into his mouth and a teasing gleam in his eye.

“A dollar a cup. Half price,” Matt smirked. “I’m not _heartless_ , Tommy.”

A pair of helicopters beat their way through the air overhead. Not gunships this time, but two of the big black hawks, both loaded with troops and on their way to someplace northeast. Georgetown or Round Rock, maybe. Rumor had it that the small MSZs there had fallen recently, overrun with infected, either from the outside or from an outbreak within. Maybe those soldiers were going there to see if the rumors were true. Who could say for sure?

“What else’ve you got for us today, Matt?” Don asked, giving the army choppers no more than a curious glance.

Matt grinned broadly; this was his favorite part of any business transaction. “What do you call a guy who cries while he masturbates? … A tearjerker!”

Most of the men laughed, even Landeros, who wasn’t supposed to speak English. Joel didn’t laugh. Joel rarely laughed. Matt had taken a special interest in Joel as a result.

“Joel, what do you call a cheerleader with pigtails?”

Joel looked at him, one eyebrow cocked, but said nothing. He poured a stream of cold Pepsi out of the can he’d bought from Miguel into his white plastic cup. It fizzed and foamed, and he tried not to think about a little girl who had loved soda on the weekends, the only time of the week when she had been allowed to eat junk food.

“A blowjob with handles!” Matt exclaimed.

The men laughed again. Joel might have smiled but if he did, he hid it quickly behind the rim of his cup. The big Texan was all business, today more than usual.

Joel scratched idly at the scar of the still-pink gouge across the bridge of his nose. A rock had done it, slicing the flesh away from the bone as he tumbled down the hillside, bullets from the National Guardsman’s rifle still buzzing through the air above him. Five months since he'd been wounded more deeply than a mere bullet could ever hurt a man. Five months since he'd lost Sarah. Five months and already he could see that there was no coming back from this, no coming back to the world the way it had been, no coming back to normal, no matter how much the government folks insisted that these difficult times were almost at an end.

No, Joel wasn’t blind and he didn’t spend all day cooped up inside the fences like most people did. He was out here every day, in a city that had been familiar all his life but had become a strange and unfamiliar place since September, and he could see things clearly. Stay here and it was only a matter of time before they finished this wall and watched the gate close from the outside. There was no place in there for guys like him and Tommy. They weren’t important, just useful. Matt seemed to be doing just fine out there on his own. He’d said that there were a few communities north of here that were making it okay, or at least well enough to do some trade with guys like him, provided you rolled up with enough armed guys of your own. Small, illegal holdouts that didn’t evacuate to the urban centers like they were ordered to. Or maybe they did and saw that it was a dead end so they hauled ass for someplace else. Waco. Tyler. Winnsboro. Towns where people had built their own tiny safe zones in the places that the army didn’t patrol anymore. If they could do it, Joel and his brother could do it too. But someplace else, someplace where there wasn’t already somebody calling the shots. Joel wanted to set up camp in a place where nobody could tell him what to do. He was sick and tired of following other people’s orders.

From somewhere south, more gunfire came, different than before. Not the rifles of the soldiers pinned down in the park for the last half hour, nor the heavy chain gun of the helicopter sent to rescue them. This sounded like the big machineguns mounted on the Humvees. Joel knew the sound well. Several of the big trucks escorted the buses of workers back and forth from the MSZ to the worksite and they almost always had to deal with infected or stragglers. Jerry and Hector looked in the general direction of the sound. No one else did. Gunfire was a boring, commonplace sound now.

“Never mind my brother,” Tommy said to Matt with a sly grin. “He always gets cranky ‘round this time of day.”

“It’s puttin’ up with you that does it to me,” Joel said as good-naturedly as he could manage. He wasn’t in a mood to deal with Tommy’s silly crap but this wasn’t the place to fight about it. Couldn’t this kid be serious for two damn minutes? Lunch was only an hour long and damn near ten minutes of it was already gone.

“You guys really using vegetable oil on the forms?” Matt seemed to know quite a bit about construction, though he had no interest in joining a crew for the obvious reasons.

Don started to speak but Joel talked over the first words out of his mouth until the older man fell silent. Joel wasn’t the most senior man on this crew, but he could be the most belligerent.

“Bellanger wanted us to mix up our own stuff and do this thing the right way. Mineral oil, paraffin, linseed. Do it right, yeah? But he fucked up and told that FEMA jackass that if we couldn’t get the stuff we needed, diesel fuel or vegetable oil would do in a pinch. Which it will, I reckon.”

“Sort of,” Don added with a derisive snort.

More heavy, thudding gunfire. Maybe closer, maybe not. No one looked this time.

Joel continued. “So that shit head took the easy way out and wrote down vegetable oil on the requisition list. So that’s what we’ve got to work with down there.”

“Not enough of it or else they wouldn’t have hired me to track down more,” Matt observed. “I mean, _vegetable oil?_ They running out of that stuff too? Jesus.”

Don shrugged and handed Miguel ten dollars for one of the little packages of swiss rolls, twice what the ‘beef and bean’ burritos that barely contained any meat cost. “Somebody else probably saw the vegetable oil goin’ out to the site and realized there were better uses for it than construction work.”

Matt adjusted his cap again. “Tap dancing Christ. Does anybody down there know what the hell they’re doing from one day to the next?”

“Probably didn’t trust us to mix up our own coating material,” Enzo sighed. “They don’t trust anybody but the soldiers.”

“Like they know more about this job than we do,” Tommy grumbled.

“Those FEMA shit heads are lazy and cut every corner they can,” Hector said, “but they want perfection from everybody else.”

“Yeah. But it’s better than suckin’ down diesel fumes all day, I guess,” Don grumbled.

Tommy chuckled and poured the rest of his Pepsi into his cup. “Smells better too. Feels like I’m greasin’ up a big brownie pan in there.”

“Mmm. Brownies,” Matt sighed happily.

Sarah’s favorite treat had been her grandma’s brownies. Joel said nothing and looked at his watch for a moment. It was still keeping good time. Eleven minutes past noon. He rubbed it reassuringly, smearing the face of it with a thin coating of vegetable oil from his palm. His shirt was too dirty to wipe it off. He made a mental note to clean it properly when the bus took them back to Allendale at sunset.

Joel nodded to Tommy, a thrust of his bearded chin pointing at a small truck, a metallic blue Suzuki Equator, pulling up to the gate, a desert camo patterned Humvee just behind it. A thin wisp of smoke could be seen rising from the .50 cal machinegun on top.

“Here she comes finally. Maybe we ought to get down to business, don’tcha think?”

“Yeah,” Tommy replied, serious at last.

The other guys tried their best to watch without watching as the blue truck drove inside the fence and pulled to a stop near Bellanger and the others. The foreman spoke to the driver briefly and motioned towards Joel and the others. The truck began to make its way across the bustling worksite towards them. There were two people in the cab.

“Shit,” said Tommy.

“Who’s that with her?” Miguel asked. Almost fifty years old, his eyes were not as sharp anymore.

“Soldier,” Enzo said unhappily, crossing himself as he spoke.

“Fuck,” Miguel said and shook his head.

“If we’re busted, they’ll kill us all right here and now,” Don muttered.

“We’re ain’t busted,” Joel said in a low voice.

“He’s right,” Matt said. “They wouldn’t send one guy to kill all of us. The guards know I’m armed to the fucking teeth. So be cool, guys. This is manageable.”

“Yeah,” Joel said, and finished his soda.

The small, blue pickup came to a stop. Unlike the other two trucks parked there, this one was well maintained and had been washed sometime in the last month. The driver worked for FEMA, so appearances had to be maintained as she went from zone to zone. The door opened and the woman behind the wheel stepped out. Some of the men present did a better job of hiding their stares than others.

Alexa Lavesque had been very pretty by the standards of the days before the outbreak. But now, compared to most of the other women crowded into the MSZs wearing whatever mismatched things they could find and bathing once a week if they were lucky, this woman was stunning.

She fixed eyes darker than her chestnut hair on Matt, all the while quite aware that the men seated on the grass were doing a terrible job of not looking at the shape of her ass in her clean, snug jeans or her freshly laundered blouse and the nicely outlined breasts so prominent beneath the white cotton.

“Mr. Keller. I see you found the items Foreman Bellanger needed.” She was French Canadian and her accent sounded exotic and sexy to a group of men who had never been to the great white north.

“Always do,” Matt grinned, cocking a finger gun at her slyly. “Got something for you too, Ms. Lavesque.”

He produced a Kit Kat from inside his truck and she took it from him with half-smile.

“Gotta keep buying them off so they don’t lock me up,” he said to the man in the camouflage uniform who had come around Alexa’s truck to stand with them. “Didn’t bring one for you, soldier. Didn’t know you were coming.”

“Lance Corporal Harvat is not a soldier, he is a marine. He is accompanying me today in my duties, Matthew,” Alexa said, adjusting the red-brown french braid behind her neck. “There has been an increase in the presence of infected in this area and Assistant Director Goltz thought I would benefit from the protection of a marine.” She smiled at her armed escort. “I think she was right.”

Lines of command were becoming blurred. There had been a small detachment of marines sent into provide defense for the supply depot. Someone somewhere had pulled strings to impress someone else. Now forty or so men from the USMC found themselves on permanent loan to the US Army in Austin. The fit was not a comfortable one for anyone.

“Infected sonsabitches are drawn by the sound of the construction work,” Joel said. Alexa’s eyes settling on him made the Texan feel warmer. She nibbled at the edge of the partially unwrapped Kit Kat with gleaming white teeth and winked at him so quickly that he wasn’t sure he had seen it.

Miguel tossed the soldier one of the packs of swiss rolls and nodded, one working man to another. Harvat devoured them eagerly. Sweets were becoming scarce in the zones. Comfort food wouldn’t last much longer. It was pretty much the only comfort left in times like these.

Alexa looked at the ID card hanging from Miguel’s neck. She pretended she did not know him.

“3v,” she said idly, reading the number above the name, one finely shaped eyebrow arched at the impressively low number the man had. Clearly, he had been one of the first men in line when the opportunity to join work details had been announced. “I will see to it that you are reimbursed, Mr. Escudero.”

“Ah, call me Miguel, please,” he said, briefly doffing his cowboy hat in gentlemanly deference to her fairer sex, introducing himself to a woman he already knew quite well to maintain the illusion of unfamiliarity she was creating for the marine watching the exchange. “And don’t worry about it. It is my gift to him for keeping us all safe, okay?”

“Thanks,” Harvat said through a mouthful of cake. The assault rifle slung over his shoulder smelled faintly of gunpowder. He had seen some action today.

“You know,” Alexa said, returning her gaze to Matt. She teased him gently. “I don’t see your ID card on display, Mr. Keller. Everyone else has theirs out, as is required.”

Joel felt his temper rising. He didn’t like her being quite so friendly with Matt.

Matt displayed his best ‘aw shucks’ grin and replied, “Would you believe I lost that darn thing. _Again_. Maybe Joel will let me borrow his?”

Joel forced his hand not to become a fist.

“Take Tommy’s,” Joel said, trying to be a good sport. “He’s got the best number in the crew.”

Alexa looked at Tommy, who was grinning cockily. She spoke in that silky smooth accent that drove Joel crazy. “How is it the case that he is the older brother yet you have the lower number, Thomas?”

Joel spoke before his brother could, drawing Alexa’s eyes again. “He started this job before I did. Eager beaver. Brownnoser, some might say.”

Tommy chuckled and spoke daringly. “Hell, don’t listen to him. I got him this job, the lazy SOB. Had to cash in some favors to do it, too. Promised Bellanger I wouldn’t let him sleep on the clock. Ain’t been an easy promise to keep neither. Old guys like their naps, you know.”

Alexa laughed and Joel sighed into his cup as he sipped more Pepsi. His anger with Tommy was simmering. The kid felt he had a right to every woman he met and he never took anything half as serious as he should. They would talk about this later, Joel decided. He made a note to give Tommy a good cussing when they got back to the church tonight.

Joel knew that was really upsetting him was the presence of the marine. Alexa had always arrived alone when she came to make sure Matt’s visits went unlogged, just as her FEDRA superiors instructed her to do. But not today. Today of all damn days. They were supposed to put the final parts of their escape plan together, making sure they would be able to get the gear they needed when they slipped out in a few weeks. But those plans were shot to hell now. Alexa couldn’t speak freely with Harvat present. That wasn’t Tommy’s fault, Joel knew, but he was still going to let his younger brother have it later.

Don was saying something to Alexa, something about needing tools to install a drainage system in the wall. Bellanger had been making the case too, but the geek sent out by FEDRA hadn’t seen the point in it. The geek’s bosses wanted the wall up now, not in a month, but now, so the geek wanted that too. Why did concrete walls need plumbing? It had sounded like a poor lie told in the attempt to keep this bunch of guys working outside the lousy MSZ for as long as they could manage. He had dismissed the idea in the interest of staying on schedule and pleasing his bosses.

While Don pleaded his case regarding the need for drainage, Joel ran through the inventory in his head.

Alexa had the third truck they needed. Matt said he had a tow-behind U-Haul cargo trailer stashed somewhere outside the city. He had enough canned food to last ten people for a couple of months hidden in an abandoned house outside of town. Last week Alexa said she had managed to get several weapons removed from the inventory lists. A shotgun and a few pistols from the Crestview MSZ, another handgun and several boxes of ammo from the Windsor Park MSZ, a dozen pistol magazines and three boxes of shotgun shells from Rosedale’s MSZ – no guns from that one, however. Some guards would only look the other way for a few minutes, and only for items they were sure no one would ever miss, mostly the ones from the disorganized piles of guns confiscated from civilians as they entered the zones. Hell, his .357 revolver was in one of those piles. It would be nice to get it back. Alexa had done her best to secure weapons for them, mostly by bribing them with Hershey bars, packs of Skittles, bottles of Wild Turkey, and other things brought in on the sly by Matt. She had told them that the weapons were for a few well-connected citizens’ private security forces, which was entirely plausible as such things already existed in the primary MSZ.

This entire plan hinged on just a handful of people, and the only place she and Matt could meet with vendors like Miguel and Jerry and Joel’s work team without drawing any suspicion was here on the site. Miguel and Jerry had easy access to the warehouse. Matt knew the roads and the army’s patrol routes. Alexa knew how to forge the paperwork. Everyone here in this group was in on the plan. Everyone except the marine bodyguard. If Harvat became a regular presence in Alexa’s duties, then six weeks of careful planning was going to count for shit.

Joel blinked the rising anger away. Surviving meant keeping your head, no matter what. Alexa was speaking. He tried to focus on that.

“I’ll see what I can do, Donald. I promise you I will do my best to impress upon them the need for the drainage system before any more work is done.”

“A few good, wet Septembers and that wall’s gonna rot from the inside if we don’t,” Don said.

“He’s right,” Enzo added, getting up with a grunt to refill his cup with Gatorade.

Tommy had stood up at some point while Joel was lost in thought. He stood close to his older brother now, the better to be nearer to Alexa, probably.

“What’s the news of the world, Alexa?” Tommy asked.

Larry piped up for the first time since he’d sat down. “Yeah. Heard anything good?”

“Good? No,” she replied with a small, sad shake of her head.

“Heard anything at all?” Jerry asked from his seat on the tailgate, the cashbox in his lap.

“Yes. Quite a bit,” she shrugged. “But it’s only more bad news, I’m afraid.”

“Go on, tell us. Nobody here tells us jack shit,” Tommy said, swiveling his head quickly to speak to the young marine. “Nothing personal.”

Harvat chuckled darkly. “Man, nobody tells me anything either. The army grunts don’t want us leathernecks around anyhow. You’re not hurting my feelings. Tell us what you’ve heard, Ms. Lavesque.”

She sighed, wondering where to begin. She placed her hands behind her, in the small of her back, and rested them against the cold door of her truck as she leaned back and tried to take as many of the men in the small group into her sight as she could. “Japan is lost. It was announced this morning on the ComSat.”

Jerry spoke again. “I thought Japan was supposed to be free of the infection? All those world leaders relocating there and shit. Wasn’t that what they were saying on the radio last week?”

“That was last month,” Alexa replied. “CBI got in somehow. Perhaps on one of the planes bringing in all of those dignitaries. Perhaps aboard one of the many, many ships bringing in food and supplies to the islands. Who can say? It does not matter now.“

Larry plucked idly at the dried grass near his thigh. “Well, shit. I was hoping they’d make it. Somebody’s gotta make it, you know?”

Alexa looked at the big, puffy clouds drifting by in the ocean of blue above, enticing shapes unconcerned about the problems of the world below. She and her mom had often looked at clouds when she was little. Alexa wondered if her mother was still alive. It seemed unlikely.

“It will not be Japan,” she sighed. “It has been two weeks now. Tokyo is overrun with infected. So is Osaka and most of the major cities. The Empress, the Prime Minister, and what is left of the Diet has fled to the northernmost island, to a specially prepared compound there. I do not know if the other leaders from Europe and Asia who were there were allowed in to the compound. “

Joel finished off the last of his Pepsi and spoke bluntly. “So that’s it. It’s spread everywhere now.”

Alexa kept her eyes on the clouds. “New Zealand has not reported any outbreaks yet, but they seem to be the only place that can say that. Iceland was hit in December. Green Sector in Paris is gone too. It fell last week. But the French government has relocated to Lyon or they are attempting to, if the reports are accurate. There was too much static. We are not sure what was being said and we have not been able to contact them since.”

Don sighed. “Sorry to hear that. Hope you don’t have any family in Paris, girl.”

Alexa brought her gaze back to earth and the field of brown grass around her. “I’m Canadian, Don. Not French. I have never even been to Paris.”

Don rubbed the top of his head and looked away. “Sorry. Heard you speaking French to that officer sometimes, that’s all. What’s his name? Day lah pore?”

“Delaporte,” she corrected softly, her mind still far away. “We speak English and French in Canada, Donald.” The twinkle in her eye returned and she added, “The more refined parts of my nation, I should say.”

Matt elbowed Don in the ribs. “Kinda like how you Texans speak English and Spanglish, Donny.”

Tommy huffed at Matt in a friendly way. “Damn Yankees. Both of you.”

Matt responded easily, “Nebraska’s not Yankee territory, Tommy.”

“Anything north of Oklahoma is Yankee territory, man,” Tommy chuckled.

Don snorted and gave Tommy the finger. The older man was from Oklahoma, as Tommy well knew.

Joel tried to stay calm. There were things to talk about and that damned marine needed to leave before lunch was over.

Matt continued, “That’s only because we need Oklahoma as a buffer between Real America and Texas.”

“ _Real_ America?” Tommy repeated, taking the bait.

“Ah! I see now! Texas is the Quebec of the U.S.” Alexa snickered.

Tommy sniffed. “More like Quebec is the Canadian Texas.”

“As you like.” She was being playful with Tommy again. It was harder for Joel to remain calm now.

“You’re from Nebraska?” Joel asked, moving the conversation away from Texas and Tommy.

Matt nodded “Yep. From a little speck of a town called Burwell. Social center of Garfield County. Heck, our town had two ATMs. Count ‘em. _Two_. In the whole town.”

“Fancy,” Tommy smiled, rolling his eyes.

Matt grinned. He sniffed haughtily. “You’re jealous. Admit it.”

Alexa giggled. Something about the way Matt and Tommy so easily charmed the woman ate at Joel.

“Clearly, I am,” Tommy laughed. “How the hell did you wind up in Austin, man?”

“Dude! I grew up in Burwell, Nebraska. _Anything_ was an improvement,” Matt answered with his hands open plaintively. His eyes twinkled at Alexa as he added, “Even Texas.”

Joel replied in a friendly as voice as he could muster, “Watch it. Them’s fightin’ words.”

Miguel opened a Pepsi for himself. “Not so sure I wouldn’t rather be in that little town of yours, Matt. Those outta the way places might miss the worst of this mess.”

Matt leaned back against the side of Alexa’s truck, within arm’s reach of her if the sudden need for a friendly hug arrived. “Talked to my cousin Lonny there. He says it’s bad. No infection there yet, but ten feet of snow and the power keeps going out. The store shelves are all bare and all the highways are shut down to keep the travelers from spreading the shrooms. No trucks or trains means no groceries and no gasoline coming to town. Lonny says they’re waiting to be moved someplace safe. Some people from the government came through about a month ago and told them they’ll be moved to a MSZ soon. Same damn thing they’ve been telling them from the start. They keep telling them they just have to stay put a while longer until Uncle Sam’s got a place for them.”

Joel looked at Matt, noting that there was none of the usual humor in the man’s voice. “You believe them?”

Matt snorted. “Fuck, no. Nobody’s coming for them. You think the stooges in D.C. are gonna waste so much as a gallon of gas on a place like Burwell, Nebraska? It’s already been written off. All those little towns have.”

Harvat looked away and said nothing.

Miguel spoke before the silence became too uncomfortable. “Maybe not. It might turn out okay for them.”

From his place in the grass, Enzo added sincerely, “Yes. God willing.”

Matt studied the dirt under his fingernails. He sounded tired when he spoke. “God doesn’t care about Burwell, man. Nobody does.”

Enzo pushed on with his point. “Don’t give up hope, Matt.”

Matt shook his head. He wasn’t having any of it. “Even if Allah or Santa or whoever from the Legion of Superheroes did give a shit, Enzo, _there’s no place for the government to move them to_. Not really. It’s a big country and nobody was ready for shit like this. Fuck, look at the shape Austin’s in. And it’s the fucking capital of Texas… Well, it was until a month ago, right?”

Landeros spat at the ground and took another bite of his remarkably stale Hostess fruit pie. Cherry, not apple like he wanted. Everyone had it hard these days.

Matt sighed and looked at Enzo. He wasn’t mad at the pious man but he didn’t want to hear about a miraculous intervention that was already five months overdue. “CBI’s carving this county up into two kinds of places: big patches that’ve been overrun and little patches that are waiting to be. That’s just how it is now, Enzo.”

Enzo looked away. He didn’t know what else to say. Faith came easier to some people than others. Matt sighed and picked at the flaking remains of a long scab on his forearm, a healed wound made by broken glass, a big door he had bodily smashed through while escaping runners a few weeks ago at a Home Depot in the outskirts of Bastrop. He hadn’t come near the gates here for two weeks after that, not until the bloody bandaged was gone from his arm. Every trigger finger was a touchy one these days.

“It’s not that I don’t worry about my family…” Matt said, half-heartedly, pausing for a minute to make sure his emotions wouldn’t struggle free. “I asked around last time I was inside the fence at the army HQ, where all the bigwigs are -”

Larry interrupted, “Bass Concert Hall? You got inside? Where the mayor’s holed up? How?”

Matt smiled again, slyly, in his element again. “Case of good wine. Ten cans of Cheez Whiz. Twelve-pound bale of marijuana. Three kilos of cocaine, give or take. Key like that opens any door, Larry. I’ve been coming and going there easy-peasy ever since.”

Hector sighed wistfully, remembering what it felt like to sleep on a mattress instead of a hard church pew. “I hear it’s nice in there.”

Landeros nodded in agreement and crunched his way through the last of the fruit pie. Things were much, much worse in other places. He knew all about that. He had been half-starved when his cousin Hector had shown up with a cutting torch to get him out of that damn jail cell. The fucking pussy guards had left the all prisoners to die when the full extent of the outbreak had become apparent. He owed Hector for that, Miguel too. The old man had brought Jerry and his torch in the back of the brown truck he loved so much. He hadn’t robbed them yet, and wouldn’t, not so long as things didn’t get too bad. You had to stick with those you could trust. Joel and Tommy and the others, he would cross them first if it came to that, even kill them if he had need to. But not Hector and Miguel. They were okay. Jerry, too. Maybe. He was pretty okay for an anglo. Landeros would have to see how things played out from here. He brushed the crumbs from his blue and black flannel shirt and hoped he wouldn’t have to kill any of these guys. He knew he should pray if he really meant it, like his mom had taught him before she overdosed on that shit she loved so much, but he had begun to think that maybe God had lost sight of him in all this mess and Landeros didn’t want to risk getting his attention again. It was better to go unseen in such times.

“It is,” Matt said in a fine conspiratorial voice. “You wouldn’t believe how good they got it. I was in there on Tuesday morning, bringing in Doritos and dip and stuff. The FEDRA administrator was gearing up to throw a party that night in the big room to celebrate the ‘transition to stable leadership’ and all that crap. Fuck,” he said, contempt for the very notion dripping from his lips. “So many VIPs and shit. You should’ve seen it. A guy can almost forget what it’s like out here once he’s been in there a few hours.”

“Wish to hell I could get posted there,” Harvat said. “I hate it out here.”

The others nodded sympathetically. Most of them had come to hate the military but there was no point in making an enemy of this man. He was younger than any of them, a kid who had enlisted the summer before the outbreak. It wasn’t like he had ever expected this shit to happen.

Somewhere in the suburban streets south of the main road, a gun fired. Tiny, quiet pops. A weak, uneven tempo. A small pistol. A single gunman, not a squad. A straggler. Harvat looked up, no one else did.

“Anyway, I asked around about what’s going on up in Nebraska, made sure a brick of Velveeta found its way to the guys in the communications room. They said the Safe Zones at Fremont and Columbus are full and the big one at Omaha is already ‘invitation only’ so don’t even bother,” Matt continued. “I’m gonna try to get an open phone line to Lonny or my grandma tonight and tell them to either board up the windows and bunker down or haul ass for my uncle’s place in Hemingford. He’s one of those crazy guys who had a real hard-on about the end of the world. If anybody riding out this shit in style, it’s Uncle Paul.”

“Way things are going here, maybe we oughta go visit Uncle Paul,” Hector grumbled.

Matt laughed. “He hates strangers on general principle, buddy. And he sure as fuck wouldn’t be happy to see so many Mexicans coming over his fence, I can tell you that.”

Miguel laughed, Landeros and Enzo too. Hector didn’t, but he managed a polite smile. He didn’t find too many things funny since his niece, Adriana, all he had left of his brother’s family, had been transferred to another MSZ in distant Houston. Her soldier boyfriend had managed to get her out when he got transferred there and Hector was glad for that. She would be safer in Houston, he was certain of that, but he was very lonely now. His cousin, the surly Landeros, wasn’t good company for anyone. The cops had only managed to pin the sale of stolen goods on him, but not the robberies or the murder. Landeros swore he was innocent of that, but Hector had his doubts. Still, family was the only important thing in a crisis. He didn’t regret freeing the big man from jail. He had nightmares about the other men in the cells, howling and pleading. But there had been so many of them. If he and Jerry had set them free, those men might have killed them and Miguel too, waiting outside in the truck. Everyone had regrets, now. Everyone had blood on their hands. If Landeros had killed anyone, it wasn’t anything Hector wasn’t guilty of too now.

“Nebraska?” Joel stretched and muttered, “You ain’t gettin’ me out of Texas. That’s for damn sure.”

“Says the man in the Los Angeles windbreaker” Matt quipped.

“Didn’t choose it,” Joel shrugged. “It what they handed out the mornin’ I arrived at the Triage Center. Fuck, I don’t even like baseball all that much.”

“Well that’s good,” Matt snarked. “I hear the World Series is cancelled this year.”

Landeros laughed. He hated baseball. He preferred boxing and dog fights.

Another pair of flat, muffled pistol shots sounded from somewhere beyond the fence, maybe a mile away. A strange look crossed Harvat’s face. There was a noticeable tenseness in his voice when he spoke.

“I’m going to check in with the gate and see what sort of situation is forming up out there. We’re going to have to drive home through it, whatever it is. Better to know what kind of crap we’ll be stepping in.”

“A good idea, Corporal. Thank you.” Alexa said.

“You’ll be okay here for a few minutes?” he asked, adjusting the weight of the rifle on his shoulder

“Of course. These men are teddy bears,” she said, flicking her dark eyes towards Joel as she spoke, a hint of a devious smile on her full lips.

Lance Corporal Harvat moved off at a trot, collecting Private Barathan near the trench as he went. The two men made for the gate, a few others soldiers doing the same thing. Joel nodded to Alexa. This was as alone as they were ever going to get.

“I must tell you before we go through with this: it is not going well out there,” she said. “FEDRA does not allow us to speak about this. We in the office aren’t even officially supposed to know about it. But civil war has broken out here in the States.”

Don turned to face her, shocked. “No shit?”

Alexa spoke quickly. The marine might return soon. “The governors of Nevada and Kansas have turned their National Guard units against the army units controlled by FEDRA. They do not recognize the authority of the new agency. Utah and Ohio may be considering doing so as well. I do not know for certain. Reports are sketchy.”

“Fuck,” Tommy exhaled with a rueful shake of his head. “Guess the takeover ain’t goin’ as smoothly as FEDRA says it is.”

Matt snorted. “What? I thought we were all grateful for FEDRA leadership during this time of crisis? That’s what the guy on CNN said. Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me it was all bullshit?”

Alexa risked a glance at the soldiers gathering along the fence. More pistol shots had sounded, echoing from somewhere beyond the distant buildings. “This is why supplies lines across the state are so disrupted. Governor Perry is in a standoff with FEDRA in Houston. Tensions are high in El Paso and San Antonio, just as they are here. War could break out in Texas at any time.”

Joel crossed his arms at the stupidity he was hearing. “Jesus. What’s the fuckin’ point?”

Larry looked up from his spot in the grass. “Maybe we can stop this FEDRA bullshit before it’s too late, Joel.”

Joel frowned and grunted in irritation. “Or we could all get drafted to fight a war we ain’t got no goddamn chance of winnin’. Texas is in a world of shit right now. Everybody is. Nobody’s got time for this bullshit, Larry. It’s the crazy damn things out there we oughta be concerned with, not who’s sittin’ at the head of the table.”

Don crossed his arms and sat on the tailgate of Matt’s truck, careful to keep clear of the loose loops of barbed wire hanging free from the edges. “Might be FEDRA that drafts us.”

Jerry sighed and drummed his fingers on the lid of the cashbox in his lap. “Fuck that shit. I’m not even from Texas. I might fight for Arizona, but not for Rick Perry.”

Tommy turned to Alexa. “I was born and raised here. Fuck FEDRA. I ain’t fightin’ for these bastards. I sure as hell ain’t fightin’ other Texans just on their say so.”

“FEDRA controls most of the military bases, Tommy, and virtually all of the airfields,” Alexa replied. “Also, please remember that FEDRA has the Air Force and all their bombers. Should it come to war here, it will not go well for Texas.”

“You ain’t seen us fight, Alexa,” Tommy snorted, unbowed by her admonition.

“Bravery is nothing against bombs, I’m afraid,” she said a little defiantly. This was not her country or her war, but the outcome of such a thing was obvious. “The people in New Hampshire learned that lesson last month.”

Jerry spoke. “There was a civil war in New Hampshire? No shit?”

Matt nodded to no one in particular but said nothing more. In his line of work, you heard a lot of things.

“A very, very brief one, yes,” Alexa answered. “Ten days or so. Heavy bombing of the rebel MSZs in Concord and Manchester, followed by an unconditional surrender from what was left of the rebel leadership. The governor is either dead or she’s gone missing. No one knows. It matters little now.“

“So FEDRA settled that mess pretty quick, huh?” Larry muttered.

“The rumor is that FEDRA destroyed the rebel’s defensive walls, exposing the encampments and all the civilians to the outside, and let the infected have them. I don’t know for certain that this is true, but it’s what I’ve heard.” Alexa tucked her chin in and tried to bury her head between her shoulders as a cold breeze blew over the field.

“I can’t believe it,” Enzo said.

Joel didn’t look at Enzo as he husked, “Wanted to make an example of them, I reckon.”

“Live free or die, right?” Tommy groused. It was the only state motto he could remember from social studies class.

Discouraged, Miguel puckered his lips and blew warm air out into the cold breeze as he wiped a small smudge from the hood of his truck with his thumb. “It’s gonna be every man for himself real soon, guys.”

Matt chuckled bitterly and carefully adjusted the shoulder holster he wore. “Outside the MSZs, it already is, old man. If you’re not buttoned up someplace safe with a lot of guns and high fence, you’re fucked. I mean it’s _crazy_ out there and getting worse every day.”

No one said anything. Joel watched the big plane finally begin its descent towards the fortified airport across the city. He wondered if any of the goods it carried would find their way to the people cooped up at Allandale. Probably not.

Matt spoke again, this time more quietly, a serious tone they rarely heard from the man. “Something weird to tell you guys. I mean, _really_ fucking weird.”

Don looked up. “What?”

“I was up in Rockdale three days ago at the Super WalMart, loading up on charcoal and lighter fluid for that FEDRA guy’s party… and I ran across this infected guy… But he wasn’t acting right.”

“What do you mean?” Jerry asked.

“He didn’t rush me… He just… _watched_ me.”

“Then he wasn’t infected,” Joel said flatly.

“Oh, he was infected, alright,” Matt insisted. “Half his damn face was sprouting mushrooms. He’d lost an eye to that shit. It was just hanging there on his cheek.”

“Maybe he was dead?” Don offered. “Or tangled up in somethin’ and couldn’t move?”

“Nope,” Matt said with a firm shake of his head. He crossed his arms and continued. “He started out way over by the automotive stuff, but when I tried to draw a bead on him with my rifle, he ducked out of sight.”

“Horseshit,” Joel said.

“I’m not fucking around, Joel. He _took cover_ , Joel,” Matt snapped. “He hid, circled around, and I saw him peeking at me from over by the lawn furniture. He was _watching_ me. It felt like he was waiting for me to turn my back. I raised the rifle up again and he hid.”

“Matt…” began Larry skeptically.

“I’m telling you it happened!” Matt glowered. “The fucker was trying to get around behind me or something. It was waiting for an _opportunity_.”

“Infected don’t wait. They run right at you as soon as they see you,” Joel said, trying to cow Matt with the force of his stare.

Matt was having none of it.

“I thought so too… But I saw what I saw, Joel. They’re getting smarter. Or at least that one was.”

“Ave María Purísima,” Enzo whispered, deeply unsettled, forgetting to cross himself this time.

“I have heard no reports of such behavior among the infected,” Alexa said, studying Matt’s face intensely, hoping this was a joke or an exaggeration on his part.

Matt ignored her. He spoke to Joel instead. “I don’t know where it went after that and I didn’t go looking for it. I was scared shitless. I jumped in the truck and hauled ass for a general store on the other end of town. There are easier ways to get charcoal.”

“Weird,” Don said, allowing for the possibility that Matt wasn’t embellishing a story to entertain them.

Joel didn’t believe a word of it. He had seen the infected up close at the beginning of the outbreak and now, months later, he often saw them rushing at the bus as it carried the men to this worksite. Usually the soldiers cut them down before they reached the convoy, but every now and then the infected pounded at the sides of the bus, screeching and clawing at the windows, desperate to reach the people they could see inside. The ones that had been infected the longest were in the worst shape, faces and necks bearing patches of fungal growth, tendrils growing out of nostrils and ears, veins on the arms bulging with spreading colonies of the spores. But they always acted the same: mindlessly and filled with inhuman rage, ready to claw and bite, even the ones who were crying while they did it.

The infected were mindless. They didn’t stalk you. Joel knew that for a goddamn fact. He changed the subject.

“That ain’t all the bad news,” Joel said. “Irish Mike and Jay are gone.”

“Infected?” Alexa asked.

“AWOL?” asked Matt.

“Don’t know,” Joel admitted grudgingly. “Nobody’s sayin’. But their names ain’t on the work roster no more and I didn’t ask Bellanger. We spent a lot of time around those two on the last couple of build sites, you know?”

Tommy pursed his lips unhappily. “Don’t need Bellanger makin’ that connection, that’s for damn sure.”

“Army’s got them?” Jerry asked.

Joel nodded. “Saturday night I saw ‘em in line at the cafeteria. Sunday, I looked around for ‘em, quiet as I could, and nobody knows where they went.”

A single pistol shot from somewhere south. A distant scream of terror and pain. Echoes that faded away quickly. No one in the group paid it much attention.

Tommy picked up the thread of the story. “Rumor is that Jay got drunk and startin’ talkin’ shit about the army and FEMA. Er, FEDRA, I guess,” he shrugged, the distinction being a moot point to him. “Shawna at the cafeteria said that Mike was sittin’ with Jay and a couple of other guys, eatin’ whatever hot crap was for dinner that night, and Jay was talkin’ shit about what a prison this place has become and most of the guys were noddin’ their heads. The army watched a while and when they left, a couple of army guys followed ‘em out. Nobody’s seen ‘em since.”

Larry spoke angrily through his teeth. “Then you can guess what happened to them. Stupid bastards. They couldn’t keep their mouths shut just a little while longer?”

Matt sighed in exasperation, still stung that nobody had believed the tale of his strange encounter with the sneaky infected man. “Fuck. We needed them. Irish Mike especially. That guy’s a good welder.”

“Was,” Don groused.

Matt conceded the point. Mike was in the past tense now. “Yeah.”

Alexa’s voice was determined and controlled, her mind made up. “We must leave tonight.”

Miguel swiveled his head around to look at her his eyes wide under his cowboy hat. “What?”

Joel nodded, seeing the sense in it clearly. “She’s right. They were in on this thing. They’ll talk.”

Hector shook his head. “Mike’s too tough to talk. All those crazy redhead vatos from Boston are like that. And Jay won’t say a goddamn thing just to spite the fuckers. The army killed his boy. Remember?”

Joel scratched at his beard, his mouth turned down at the edges. “Anybody’ll talk, Hector. All it takes is time and a big hammer or some pliers.”

Don hissed angrily. “Shit.”

Tommy did the same. “Fuck.”

Landeros spit again and muttered something blasphemous under his breath that made Enzo wince.

Matt looked to the heavens to see if God was coming down to help his most devoted fan, Enzo, anytime soon. Not today, it seemed. He smiled at the absurdity of the world. “Well this bad plan turned badder in a hurry.”

Joel sniffed and crossed his arms, his eyes hard. “Yeah.”

No one said anything for a few moments. No more shots were coming from the city but the soldiers lingered along the fence anyway, just in case. Alexa pretended to write something important on her clipboard. She would have to move back to the central cluster of buildings soon, before she drew any suspicion, and Matt would be asked to depart if he overstayed his welcome. Lieutenant Robinson could look the other way only so long.

“Gotta be tonight,” Matt said.

Alexa nodded but didn’t look up from the clipboard that she feigned interest in. “I can be ready on my end, I assure you. But it will have to be done very quickly. “

Miguel wiped another smudge off his beloved truck. “Get those two trailers out of the fence and me and Jerry’ll hook ‘em up to my truck and yours and say we’re taking them wherever you tell us to, Alexa. You just gotta get ‘em out of that motorpool first.”

“I will do my best, Miguel, but with so little time to prepare now, it will be sloppy. There will be no time to cover my tracks. I will have no choice except to deliver the paperwork myself. Abigail will discover what I’ve done when she arrives in the morning. Once I give the soldiers the forged paperwork to release the generator and the big drum of fuel…” Alexa let the words hang there for a moment. “You understand, of course, that it is not a thing that can be undone, gentlemen. If I am not safely away from here by morning, Assistant Director Goltz will learn what I have done and I will be arrested and shot, simple as that. Miguel and Jerry may have some amount of deniability, but I will not. Abigail will turn me over to Captain Bellamy and he will have me executed,” she hugged herself as discretely as she could manage. It wasn’t just the cold air that chilled her now. “And probably tortured first. I’m not one of those redheads from Boston like our friend Michael Walsh. I would not keep any secrets for long, I’m ashamed to admit.”

Matt leaned over and gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “I know, Alexa. I wish I was as tough as Mike myself. But we can make this work. I’ll tell the guys at Gate 11 that we’re trying to get Lee’s private residence in Hudson Bend ready on time and FEDRA is bending a few rules to make it happen.”

Joel set his hard gaze on the lanky Nebraskan. “And you reckon they’ll buy that load of bullshit, boy?”

Tommy sighed in downcast agreement. “Yeah. They’re just gonna let them drive outta the main Zone with a couple of pickups haulin’ a generator and a big bowser of diesel? No army escort? No soldiers along for the ride? That sounds pretty damn sketchy, Matt.”

“Happens more than you think, man,” Matt smirked confidently, five years younger than Joel and the expert in these sorts of affairs. “Hell, half the time the guards see me, it’s the middle of the night and I’m making a midnight run from one zone to another for some officer or a FEDRA honcho who wants something that they can’t get through official channels. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve been paid good money to look the other way while some poor grunt loads stuff into my truck and cover it with a tarp. Stuff that just sort of disappeared off the inventory list, if you catch my drift. Hell, I know all the best roads to use at night. The ones that aren’t patrolled but aren’t blocked off either.” He leaned against the truck, cocky as hell. “If I’m with them when they hook that stuff up to their trucks at the depot, Alexa and Miguel can just follow me out through the gate, no questions asked. I’ll have lots of whiskey and pills to buy off the guards and it won’t be the first time I’ve done it for a big haul either. I’ve been a part of a few multi-truck scavenger convoys. More shit gets done under the radar at that place than you’d believe, Tex.”

Joel grimaced unhappily. He knew this was Matt’s job. And Joel hadn’t been allowed outside the fences unescorted since he and Tommy had sought refuge here back in October, when it became clear that there was no way he was ever getting back to his home in one piece and nobody was interested in helping their neighbors anymore. Doors were locked, windows were boarded up, and shotguns had a way of appearing through the gaps if you got too close to a house, even if you had known the person inside since you were kids. Nobody was helping anybody anymore. Nobody could. Dead bodies were in every parking lot and screaming lunatics hid in every shadow, ready to spread their sickness if they saw you out on the street. The city Joel knew was long gone and only Matt was familiar with the new Austin. Joel wanted out of this place.

Miguel spoke, knocking Joel out of his dark reverie. “What about you, Joel? Can you and Tommy deliver?”

“Yeah. Me and Tommy and Don in good with this paramedic at the Allandale clinic. We helped her and the staff put the place together and we still do upkeep work for them on the side. Her name’s Lisa and she said she can get a whole mess of antibiotics and blades and all sorts of shit out of there. She’s been squirrelin’ it away for a while now, got it hid somewhere safe. She’s ready to go. Larry and Enzo have the first two watch shifts at the church after lights out tonight, so they’ll have the keys to the backdoor.”

“You slip out of the church, good, but what about the zone’s perimeter fence?” Alexa asked. She didn’t live in the squalid Allandale MSZ. She knew almost nothing about it.

“No problem,” Joel said. “We know a place we can get out, through a second story window of the Northcross mall on Burnett Road. It’s broken and it never got boarded up. The perimeter fence ends at the parking lot there and Don managed to lose a small set of wire cutters during the big storm a few weeks ago.”

“Damnedest thing,” the older man said with a proud smirk. “Flood carried ‘em off and sucked ‘em down a drainage tunnel. That’s what I told the chairborne commandos at the tool crib, anyway.”

Joel continued. “We wait for the patrol to pass at eleven thirty, then we sneak a few blocks to that middle school and lay low there till you pick us up, Matt.”

“The timing will be very important, Joel,” Alexa said. “The patrols –“

“My watch works just fine, girl,” Joel replied self-assuredly.

“Good,” Matt said. “You guys stay there and keep out of sight until midnight, and I’ll swing around and pick you up once I’ve got Alexa in Miguel in tow. We should be long gone by the time the next patrol notices the hole in the fence.”

“God willing, no infected will find it before the army does,” Enzo said to no one.

“Lisa’s cousin is part of the deal, though,” Tommy added.

“What?” Matt furrowed his brow.

“He’s all the family she’s got left,” Tommy explained. “She won’t go without him.”

“Fine. We gotta have a doctor,” Matt shrugged. “I hope her cousin has some useful skills.”

“No idea,” Joel said. “But we need a medic if we’re gonna make it out there. If that means that this ‘Phil’ guy comes with us, I don’t care, just so long as we get her.”

“Agreed. Worth the price,” Matt replied.

“Cassie wants in too,” Jerry said.

Don chuckled and Hector snorted in derision.

“Cassie is fifty years old,” Matt said, trying not to sound like too much of an asshole.

“Somebody that old’s got no business bein’ outside the fence, Miguel,” Joel said.

“I’m that old, too!” Miguel protested. “She’s a good cook. She made those burritos you guys just ate.”

“The beef and bean burritos?” Tommy snarked. “My stomach’s still lookin’ for the beef.”

Miguel pressed on. “She can stretch ingredients like you wouldn’t believe. You guys ate better today than the guy’s who went to Lou’s truck, I’ll tell you that. I saw what Shawna made for them. Peanut butter sandwiches! A thin little smear on bread hard as bricks. We’ll be well fed with Cassie there and our food will last longer if one person has the run of the kitchen and a menu for us instead of everybody helping themselves to a snack whenever they please!”

Miguel and his wife had raised a large family in the days before the outbreak. His wife had known how to do a lot with a little. He missed his wife and recognized many of the same talents in Cassie. He would not leave her behind. He had already promised as much.

“A cook would be a nice luxury to have,” Alexa opined, earning a smile from the old man.

Joel sucked at his teeth and looked to the heavens. No answers coming from there, he cut his eyes over to Matt, who was already looking at him, waiting to hear his thoughts on the matter.

“Fine by me,” Joel shrugged, sensing the unasked question. “How ‘bout you, Matt?”

“Yeah, fine. Cool. We’ll have a cook. Is there anybody in Austin we’re _not_ taking with us tonight? Don? Got some old navy buddies who need a ride? Hector? Have any more cousins I don’t know about?”

Don grinned. Hector and Landeros laughed. Miguel said a silent prayer of thanks. He knew what would happen to the cooks here when the food ran out one day. The mob would tear them apart, convinced they were secretly hiding food for themselves, even if the shelves were bare. He had saved Cassie. He wished he could do more, but he had pressed his luck far enough today.

Tommy spoke. “The rest of the plan still the same, Matt?”

“Yeah. Gather up everybody and haul ass for La Grange.”

Joel brought up his boot to rest the heel on the bumper of the truck. “Situation’s still good there, right?”

Matt nodded. “Been down there twice in the last six weeks. Abandoned. Everybody evacuated, just like they were told to do. Nobody stayed, as far as I can tell. No assholes have moved in either. It’s a ghost town and as far as I know, the army doesn’t patrol that far west anymore. They only seem to go out as far as Smithville and Giddings, more or less. I’m pretty sure La Grange is off their radar now.”

Alexa chimed in to support Matt’s theory. “The town is too far away to waste the fuel, I believe.”

Tommy balked a bit at this. “Seriously? It’s only sixty miles or so from here to there.”

Alexa held firm to her supposition. “Sixty miles is a much larger distance than it once was, Tommy. The controlled space around Austin has shrunk to less than forty miles now. Rumor has it that soon anything more than ten or fifteen miles beyond the MSZs will be ‘no man’s land’ for all practical purposes. The army simply doesn’t have the men or the means to push out farther than that anymore, not in any meaningful way.”

Jerry was skeptical. “Really? Won’t this place get hemmed in pretty fast if they don’t keep the streets clear?”

Alexa gave a small sigh. “There are rumors of a bombing campaign to destroy any hiding places outside the MSZz. It is only a rumor at the moment, but the army is getting desperate. If things do not turn around in a year or so, the air force will have to commit to the plan while there is still enough aviation fuel in reserve to allow for such an operation.”

“Jesus,” Hector said. “They’re just going to blow up all our homes and schools? Churches? Bars? Everything?”

“No comin’ back from that,” Tommy said in mild disbelief and disdain. “There goes everybody’s hopes for a normal life.”

Don dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “No way. There’s a ton of eighteen-wheelers hitched up to tankers inside that fence around Bass Hall. Drums and drums of fuel too, all stacked up. I’ve seen it. The army can keep patrollin’. They got the gas for it. They don’t need to blow up all our shit to make their jobs easier.”

“Resupply is becoming irregular,” Alexa said bluntly. While these men had heard the rumors, she had seen the actual reports. “It may soon stop altogether. And so FEDRA has decided to tightly ration the supplies they have remaining, and that means pulling back from the surrounding areas. Even Giddings is almost too far now. A helicopter overflies it once a month or so. No patrols make the drive out there anymore. It will likely go on the ‘ignore list’ soon enough, as La Grange has.”

Joel didn’t care if they knocked down every house in the city. He was done with this place. “Any infected where we’re goin’, Matt?”

“A few, sure. No place is free of them anymore. But I only saw five or six stumbling around when I was checking out the places around the riverfront. Nothing we couldn’t handle. There’s a few nice, big houses with rock walls and fences along the rivers and a few little lakes too. Fancy but sturdy, you know? Any one of them would make a good place to hole up and disappear, if we’re quiet about it.”

Don mulled it over. “Find a bulldozer or somethin’ and we could fortify one of them a little more with berms and barbed wire, and have a pretty secure compound with access to lots of water. “

Matt added, “Power grid’s still on there.”

Jerry rubbed at his magnificent moustache in amazement. “No shit?”

“Yeah,” Matt smiled. “I checked out a 7-11 on my way out of town last time. Gas pumps still worked and the lights in the men’s room did too. Toilet didn’t flush though. Might want to avoid that particular stall when we get there.”

Alexa giggled at that.

“Thought the army collected all the gas from those places back in November,” Larry remarked with a mix of doubt and curiosity.

“Not all of it,” Matt said, grinning slyly. “In my glovebox, I’ve got a list of the places I know for sure still have gas in the pumps. We’ll be able to use the trucks to go around and look for supplies and stuff. Things should be okay for a while, if Miguel and Jerry can help me keep the trucks running.”

Enzo piped up, “I can help with that. I am a… what did you call me, Tommy?”

“Shade tree mechanic,” Tommy smiled.

“Yes. That’s it,” Enzo said, returning the smile. He wanted to help in any way he could.

Larry did too. He said, “I used to be an electrician, until that FEMA lady said they had enough of them and made me a construction worker instead. I can keep the electrical stuff going once we pick a house. Just ten or twelve of us in the whole town, we shouldn’t draw enough juice from the grid to be noticed by anybody monitoring stuff.”

Don sighed happily. “Lights, TV, hot water. It’s gonna be nice.”

Joel agreed. “Everything we need.”

Miguel pushed his cowboy hat back and let the warming rays of the sun fall on his craggy face for a moment. “Sounds good.”

Alexa smiled, trying very hard not to think about the complications that would arise from three women living among nine men. That was a problem to be had once they were safely out of Austin. “We’ll have the town all to ourselves and we can live as we please.”

Tommy snorted, a half-laughter, half-mischief sound. “Good. I’m way past sick of followin’ all these goddamn rules.”

Joel spoke seriously; already dreading the damn fool things Tommy was bound to get up to if left unchecked. “I’m sick of Austin.”

Another helicopter was flying towards the site, a silver one this time, the kind that businessmen used to travel around in. As it turned to descend to the landing area on the far side of the “choos” and the shacks, letters were clearly visible along the side, covering the door with an imposing, block font:

          FEDRA

“Assuming those guys didn’t come here to shoot us,” Matt said, “I’m going to get the hell out of here before I have to start throwing humongous bribes at those jackasses and lose my profit for the day. ”

“I should also leave,” Alexa said, already planning to collect Corporal Harvat at the gate. “I will see you all tonight at the middle school, yes?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Tommy said.

Joel nodded. It was a shitty plan, and a million things could go wrong, but he knew that no matter how things turned out, he was done living under FEDRA’s watch. It would be a cold day in hell before Joel ever went back to living as a number again. #181c, Miller was about to make a break for it.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this point in volume two, I had intended for you to read a nice Joel-centric flashback that told of his early days as a bandit in a chapter entitled “La Grange.” The chapter you just read was supposed to come much earlier in the volume. However, as the chapters began to come together, I realized that there were already several Joel-centric flashbacks being told on those pages, so this story had to either get dropped or pushed back to a later point in the volume. Since I’d already told several stories about Joel’s adventures on his road to Boston, I exchanged this story in place of “La Grange.” I’ll include that story in volume four, when I collect much of the deleted material for your enjoyment.
> 
> This story lacks action and sex and Ellie and all the other things I usually fill you screen with, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway. For my part, I liked working out all the details of a world in which the last vestiges of normalcy are slipping away the characters are coming to accept that this is how the world is going to be now. Some of them are handling this realization better than others, naturally.
> 
> In the first two drafts, I had more details about the military running this site, the FEDRA bosses paying them a visit, and more about the madness going on beyond the barely contained limits of Austin. But it was just unmanageably long, so I cut 4000+ words out of it. Yikes! 
> 
> The ‘sneaky infected’ that Matt describes seeing is obviously a stalker, but no one else in Austin has encountered them yet, so no one has a word for them and no one really believe his story. The people in this chapter are still dealing only with the first stage of infection: runners. They have no idea of the later, more horrific stages yet to come. According to Neil Druckmann (as seen here: http://youtu.be/HA2cuwYSIqs), it takes a year or so for a runner to become a clicker. As this is only a few months into the outbreak, runners are the only form of the infected out there, which is why so many people think they may yet turn this around and beat this new strain of Cordyceps. They have no idea of how bad things are going to be when summer arrives and the much more dangerous clickers are everywhere. That’s why Joel and the others think they have a shot of making it outside the Austin MSZs – the real nightmare is still in the future. When the infected around the world begin to transform into clickers, that’s when things are going to fall apart for good outside the walls and people will be desperate to get into the newly-built Quarantine Zones. It will be too late for most of them, of course.
> 
> “Choos” are CHUs, Containerized Housing Units used by the military for temporary living quarters. They have can sleep as many as eight men. Four or five guys can live in one pretty comfortably. Of course, this is the military, so they double the number of occupants until it’s good and cramped in there, just they way the army brass likes it.
> 
> For the military enthusiasts among you (hi, Ajax), Matt’s compact submachine gun is a Steyr SPP. It’s a fun little gun to shoot, but I imagine that Joel had probably never seen one, so he can’t identity it when he sees it. Joel is more of a shotgun man, I think.
> 
> For anyone who is skeptical that the army would allow people like Matt to come and go, I would argue that these are Military Safe Zones, an inadequate precursor to the more robust and castle-like Quarantine Zones to come. The MSZs of my world have basic barriers and fences. They’re not anything like the QZs and Austin will be mostly abandoned a year later, reduced to the heavily fortified Hudson Bend MSZ and the supply depot at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. All the little MSZs in the city will be abandoned by the army, one by one, until the civilians there are left on their own (like Henry and Sam in Hartford), punishment from FEDRA for the looming Texas Civil War.
> 
> Also, if you prowl around the docks in Boston, you can find a note regarding Robert’s secret dealings with the army’s coastal patrols. Boston was a “no nonsense” QZ and yet the government there still made “under the table” deals with smugglers to keep certain items coming into the city. The early days would probably be no different. When enough people want something, a black market will appear to satisfy that need if other channels aren’t available. 
> 
> Everybody here in Joel’s group has been mentioned at some point earlier in these two volumes. I didn’t invent anybody new for his team in this chapter. It would take too long to list their appearances, but suffice it to say that none of them survive to reach Boston except Tommy.
> 
> And that’s more than enough notes for one chapter. Come back next time when we catch up with Ellie in Chapter 22: Miss Sniffles and the Magic Chair. See you then!


	22. Miss Sniffles and the Magic Chair

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ellie wakes up with a case of the sniffles and all alone. One of those things is more frightful to her than the other.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
 **Chapter 22 – Miss Sniffles and the Magic Chair**

 

Her eyes were sticky.

She didn’t want to open them. She just wanted to lie in bed with Riley. It wasn’t often she got to visit the penthouse. Usually she had to sleep down in the slums. Riley got the top bunk and made her sleep in the bottom one. It wasn’t so bad, most of the time. Sometimes Riley threw things at her when she was down there, usually on those nights when she didn’t want to get up to get Riley a drink of water, things like wadded up socks. The trick was to wait out the bombardment. Riley rarely went to bed with more than two socks in her arsenal.

“… ril’y…” she mumbled, barely making a word. She rolled over onto her stomach, smiling, her eyes still closed. The sheets were warm and snug around her. Beneath her face, the pillow was soft and only lightly moistened with drool. Her hand snaked out, reaching for the warm shape of her friend. They had made love in this bunk bed last night, finally, at long, long last. Not just sleeping naked together, as they often did as the summer nights got warmer. More than masturbating together, lying side by side, feeling the hot, sweaty skin pressed together, listening to the needy sounds they made, feeding the desire of the other until they both came. They had done that a few times. But this was more than that. This was real sex. Good sex. The first sex she had ever had and the best sex Riley had ever had. Riley had said it before they fell asleep after. They were a couple now. That changed everything. Riley wouldn’t run away, wouldn’t say those terrible things and run off into the sweltering darkness of that July night to find the Fireflies. They were a couple now. They wouldn’t get bitten in the old, abandoned mall. They would stay together in this dorm room instead. They would make love every night. Riley would graduate and wait two years for Ellie to join her in the world outside the school. It wasn’t a great world but they would find a way to live their lives together. They would be a couple and live together and be in love forever. It was all going to work out, just like she always knew it would.

Her hand found nothing but empty sheets.

“Riley?”

Ellie levered herself up on her elbows (why was she so sore? Was it from all the sex?) and forced her eyes open.

She blinked in confusion as the world came into focus. This wasn’t right.

This wasn’t her dorm room. This was a top bunk, but not the one Riley had dubbed her ‘penthouse.’ This was a bedroom Elli had no memory of. She wasn’t in Boston. She had dreamed it.

Riley was still gone.

Tears welled up and began to fall from her eyes onto the pillow. She hung her head and cried in silence, glad that her hair was loose. It made an auburn veil around her face. She didn’t want Joel to see.

“Joel!” she whispered in alarm.

Ellie wiped her eyes quickly with the heel of her hand, scooted to the edge of the mattress, and peered over the side. The bottom bunk was empty. It had been slept in – the sheets were disheveled but none of Joel’s things were down there. She spied her backpack lying atop the squat little chest of drawers by the window, her short-stocked, sawn-off, double-barreled shotgun propped against the wall nearby. An issue of Savage Starlight was on top of the backpack, her beloved copy of No Pun Intended: Volume One was peeking out from underneath it.

_I wanted to read some jokes to him. But the camp light wasn’t charged up. We couldn’t make a water lamp. He told me I needed as much sleep as I could get._

He wasn’t here. She was alone in this room. She had all her things, but she didn’t have him. She wanted to call out, wanted to hear his voice coming from somewhere inside this little house, but she knew better. Bad guys could be anywhere.

Ellie kicked the sheets and blanket off, and slid over the edge and down to the floor.

“Ah! Fuck!” she hissed. The floor was cold. She sniffled; her nose was a little stuffy. There was daylight outside, but no warming shafts of light made it into this little bedroom. This corner of the house was in the shade of a tall tree. She pulled her small pistol from under her pillow and eased the slide back a little to confirm the brass presence of a round in the chamber.

_We found my gun in the grass by the creek. I had thrown it at the infected Firefly guy._

She trotted the four steps needed to cross the narrow room and reached for her backpack.

“Socks! C’mon, _socks!_ ” she muttered, digging through the pack, her eyes cutting to the closed door of the room. She was safe in here. Joel had made sure she was safe before he wandered off to wherever he was now. She sniffled.

_He tucked me in. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream that part. He gave me a goodnight kiss too._

_I asked him to. I didn’t think he would do it, but he did._

She was wearing one of his flannel shirts. The gold plaid one. It was warm and comfy. Her legs were bare and cold. She sniffled. She would need pants too. She pulled a pair of clean socks out and tugged them on while she stood balancing on one foot at a time.

_I’m wearing panties? But I thought he took those off. Didn’t he take them off? He slipped them off me and… his beard was so great and tickly… down there._

_His tongue felt so good._

She blushed.

_No, wait… I dreamed that part. Fuck. That was the best fucking part and it didn’t even happen. FUCK!_

She pulled out the olive drab cargo pants that she had purchased at Burlington and stepped into them. They were a little long in the leg and a bit loose around her waist. She zipped the fly and buttoned it closed. The cuffs of the legs were under her heels.

_Please be okay, Joel. Please._

_I’ll find you flossing or combing your beard or practicing your mean face in the mirror._

_You’ll be okay. I know you will._

The switchblade was also under the pillow, where she had expected it to be. She stepped into her shoes, shoving her feet into them, then dropped to one knee and began to lace them up. The new pants were a little bunched up and baggy around her ankles. She didn’t care.

_You’ll be fine. You didn’t leave. You wouldn’t leave._

She didn’t tuck the shirt in. It hung down to her thighs. She didn’t care. The pistol went into her back pocket. Her switchblade went into the other. She grabbed the shotgun from its place by the window. It was loaded with the safety on. Having it in her hands made her feel a little safer. She sniffled. She risked a glance outside, easing the faded maroon curtain aside.

Outside there was a big lake ringed with trees, the branches still mostly full of leaves: orange, red, and gold. The water rippled as a breeze blew across it. The gust dislodged several leaves and they fluttered and drifted in the wind, corkscrewing their way down to an old parking area. Along the edges of the pea gravel covered space, other cabins could be seen, small and cozy, burgundy with cream trim around the windows and doors. Picnic tables, brick red and weathered with age, maintained a lonely vigil between each pair of cabins. Fading flowers and clumps of grass dotted the parking lot.

_It’s really pretty here. Please be okay, Joel._

She sniffled.

Shotgun in hand, she held her breath and turned the doorknob.

The walls of the hallway were as unfinished as the bedroom. Beams running up from floor to ceiling, unpainted. Tightly fitted planks running from left to right. No sheetrock, no wallpaper. The walls and ceiling were smooth, unpainted wood as well. Ellie had never seen a place so rustic. She had no idea that people once lived lives so sheltered that the notion of a vacation weekend spent in a cabin carefully crafted to give the appearance of being primitive would be a pleasing change of pace from a world of carpeting and decorative wall trim.

_Did they not have time to finish this place when they built it? Maybe they were working on it when the outbreak hit?_

She stepped out into the short hallway with a soft sniffle. The door across from her was the bathroom. There was no window. It was dark in there. The door to her left was open, revealing the master bedroom. A large, neatly made bed was in there, a warm ray of sunlight tracing a slow pattern across it. Part of the big quilt had been faded by the passage of the sun over the years until a prominent stripe stood out distinctly from rest of the darker fabric. Ellie remembered it from the night before.

_I told him we should sleep in that bed. It would be warmer if we shared a bed. We could cuddle up and be nice and toasty. He didn’t go for it. I was giggling and tugging on his arm. I wanted to sleep with him so badly. I kept telling him that. “We’ll just sleep together. It’ll be fine. Don’cha wanna be warm tonight, Joel?”_

She poked her head into the big bedroom.

_God, that’s so embarrassing. I was so tired when we got here. I’ve never been so tired in my whole life. Jeez, it’s like I was drunk or something._

There was a closet and a chest of drawers. Both were empty.

_I remember we checked out the other cabins before we found this one. It was almost dark when we got here._

Nothing under the bed but twenty years of dust bunnies. She sniffled. Joel hadn’t been in here.

_I was naked when he found me. He was on the other side of the creek and kept shouting at me to get up. I finally did. But I was sort of freaked out about being naked. We walked up the banks and he kept looking over to keep an eye on me. I was naked! Fuck, I was totally naked and he could see everything. I wanted to cover up with my hands but I made myself walk like everything was cool, because that’s how much of a badass I am._

She poked her head in the small bathroom. It was so tiny that it was practically a closet. No tub, just a shower. A toilet with the tank mounted up on the wall. A chain hung from it. She had never seen one like that before. She sniffled. A small sink on the wall and a little mirror mounted above it. There were stray whiskers in the sink, black and gray. Joel had trimmed his beard here.

_There were dead clickers all over the bridge. He’d used all the Molotov cocktails and a bunch of our ammo. I was barefoot. There was black glass everywhere. He picked me up and carried me across it. I loved being in his arms. He’s so strong. I was so naked. I rested my head on his shoulder and my feet swung back and forth as he walked. He could see everything. It was all right there under his chin. I didn’t hide any of it. I couldn’t. I just wrapped my arm around his neck and let him scoop me up. If he wanted to look, he could._

_I don’t know if he did. But I hope so._

She crept down the hallway to the larger common area, shotgun up and ready.

_I had to wash the mud off while he gathered our laundry. He said we had to hurry up and get the hell out of there in case there were more infected coming. He got the bike packed while I cleaned up in the creek._

She waited at the end of the hallway, hiding around the corner, holding her breath, the barrels of her shotgun pointed at the ceiling, her ears listening for any clue. She heard the clink of metal on porcelain. She smelled eggs and a faint whiff of Joel’s little camp stove burning gasoline for fuel. Someone was making breakfast. She smiled. She sniffled.

_My jeans and stuff were in my backpack, over by the bike. I ran from the creek all the way to the bike with my towel in one hand and my shorts and tank top in the other. Butt naked the whole way. I’ve never seen him look so surprised. I wanted him to see me now that I was clean. All I needed was an excuse. I was so giddy, laughing as I ran. I told him that there was no point putting the stuff on just to take it off a minute later. I got dressed and he didn’t look. But he was sure looking as I ran across the field to him. I couldn’t stop grinning. Craziest thing I’ve ever done._

She rounded the corner with the shotgun slung casually from her shoulder. She was smiling cockily as she entered the living room.

_He had a hard-on by the time I reached him at the farmhouse. I could see it in his sweat pants. He had one on the walk back up the creek too. Those sweats don’t hide a thing. We had that evil river between us, but I could still see it sticking straight out from the front of his pants. He couldn’t hide it._

_Looking at me all naked and stuff made him horny._

She tucked her lower lip between her teeth and tried not to blush. Badasses didn’t blush.

_I gave him a boner. Me! I did that! Kind of scary. But really cool too._

He looked up from where he stood in the tiny kitchen in the corner of the living area. He was wearing his brown plaid shirt, the one he had bought in Burlington, the one she had slept in the night they spent in the old UPS truck, the night they kissed for the first time. Half a can of Spam cut into small cubes was steaming in the aluminum bowl of his mess kit. The cooking pan half of the kit was on the wire rack of the multi-fuel stove. Scrambled eggs were almost done cooking inside the pan. The can of powdered eggs that he’d bought in Burlington sat opened nearby, the handle of a spoon protruding from the top. His square LED camp light was resting in a beam of sunlight on the kitchen counter.

“Mornin’, Ellie,” he said, as though nothing had changed, as though he hadn’t seen her naked the day before, as though he hadn’t heard her having another dirty dream this morning while he slipped out of the bottom bunk and got dressed as quietly as he could, sneaking out and letting her sleep in as a treat after the crazy day she’d had yesterday. If he had struggled to push the image of her naked and smiling, running through the knee-high grass to him the day before while his cock swelled and throbbed with lust for her, the tone of his voice gave no hint of it. “Sleep well?”

“Hey, Joel,” she said as smoothly as she could manage. It was just another morning for badass sidekick Ellie Williams. She hadn’t been scared before, when she woke up alone. No way. Why would she? Badasses like her didn’t get scared. Badasses like her didn’t get ditched by their partners. Badasses stuck together. She and Joel were a team. “Yeah. I slept great. I really needed it. I’m sore all over.”

He noted the shotgun on her shoulder and the much too large flannel shirt she wore – his shirt, a thought that made his cock stir a little.

“Duck season or rabbit season?” he asked, a hint of smile on his face as he looked at her.

Ellie had never heard of Elmer Fudd but she knew Joel was making a joke of some kind. She smiled broadly and giggled, playing along. She knew how important it was to encourage Joel in things like this. He smiled, pleased that his joke had landed nicely.

“Have a seat,” he said amiably. “Breakfast is ready.”

“Cool,” Ellie answered, sniffling, unslinging her 20 gauge and laying it on the kitchen table. She sat down. A pair of nice, unchipped dinner plates and a few pieces of untarnished flatware had been scrounged up and wiped clean while she was asleep. Two blue plastic tumblers she had never seen before and a medium-sized can of apple juice sat on the table. Joel’s new can opener lay next to it. She shook the can vigorously and was cutting away the lid when Joel came over with the mixture of eggs and meat.

She sniffled again and poured the apple juice into their blue cups.

“You’re not gettin’ sick on me, are you?” he asked.

“Nah,” she said and pushed the tall tumbler of juice over to his plate on the other side of the table.

He sat the food down and reached for her forehead with the back of his fingers. She sat unmoving, smiling, while he checked her temperature. He had no idea how much these little moments meant to her. Orphans didn’t get much in the way of this sort of attention.

“Hmmm,” he said thoughtfully, “You don’t feel warm. I reckon you’re okay.”

She didn’t want him to take his hand away. She didn’t want him to sit down across from her. She wanted him to keep touching her. She wanted him to sit next to her. She never stopped smiling.

“Is that your professional opinion, Doctor Miller?”

“Yes, it is,” he said, forking a big helping of the egg and Spam mix onto his plate. “And you’re damn lucky. Hell, I let you sleep in ‘cause I figured you’d be down sick with a cold today.”

“Nah, I’m tough,” she boasted with a sniffle, pulling the pan with the remaining food towards her. She used her fork to make a small breakfast pile on her plate. The ceramic glaze on it was perfect. No cracks, no chipped edges. She had never eaten off a nice plate this nice before. “Just a stuffy nose, sorta. That’s all. Pretty badass for a girl who spent all day naked yesterday, huh?”

He chuckled. “Yeah. I reckon so.”

She grinned at him slyly.

They said no more about it. She kept hoping he would say something, anything, about having seen her naked. She was nervous but keen to hear his thoughts on the matter. He had seen her, so what did he think? Did he like what he saw? Did she look good naked? Did he want to see her like that again? Could they maybe get naked together later? But he kept any thoughts he had on the matter to himself. They talked about other things instead. Mostly, she did the talking. She asked him question after question about all they things she had seen in Burlington and she wanted so much to know more about how the world used to be and why there were all these little cabins near that big lake outside. There weren’t enough of them to be a suburb or a town. Not even a dozen buildings, but all of them alike. What sort of place was this?

“And why doesn’t this place have walls?” she asked, standing next to him at the compact kitchen sink, wiping her plate clean. They would use these plates again later, when they ate the rest breakfast for lunch, the eggs and meat wrapped up snugly in a square of foil next to the camp stove and the recharging camp light. “Real walls, I mean.”

“So it looks like you’re roughin’ it in here,” he said, folding his mess kit up. “Some folks liked the idea of roughin’ it more actually havin’ to rough it.”

“Roughing it? You mean like camping and stuff?” She worked the plastic lid tightly over the can of powdered eggs.

“Yeah. Folks would come out here on a Friday evenin’ and spend a night or two in one of these little cabins. Then they’d go back to work on Monday and tell their friends how they spent the weekend campin’ out at the lake.” Joel snorted in amusement as Ellie wiped her hands on an old kitchen towel. “That’s what passed for campin’ for some folks back then.”

“I thought camping was done in a tent or under the stars,” she said, following him from the kitchen tucked into the corner of the room and into the part of the common area that served as a living room.

“It is,” Joel said. “But some folks didn’t want to rough it all that much. They wanted a roof over their head and some electricity in the walls. So places like this were built cozy and warm but made to look like old fashioned hunting shacks so they could pretend they were livin’ more primitive than they really were.”

Ellie looked around the room. There was a sofa under the window, a blanket folded neatly across the top; a squat iron heater in the corner, four metal legs holding it up over a brick floor cutting a dark red space out of the hardwood floor; a small table in front of the sofa, an oblong surface of dark, polished wood coated in a thick layer of dust; a big brown chair with a wide back and thick padding, even on the armrests, that looked so poofy and inviting that Ellie wanted to settle into that chair and see how deeply she could sink into those cushions.

This room was as unfinished as the other parts of the cabin that she had seen earlier, with no sheetrock on the walls, just timbers forming a skeletal framework for the neatly fitted boards of the outer wall. A rug that had once been pretty nice took up most of the area in here, covering the smooth, cold hardwood floor. There were no pictures on the wall, no TV set, no video game machine with the controllers and their long cords spread out on the floor, not plastic cases filled with DVDs and no player for them either. It was a rudimentary, miniaturized version of the many living rooms she had seen on her trip with Joel. Simpler. Uncluttered. No _stuff_.

_What’s the point? If I had a bunch of stuff like that, why would I go someplace where I didn’t have my stuff? Hell, wouldn’t you go to someplace where you have even more stuff?_

“That’s kind of dumb,” Ellie observed with a sniffle, her head cocked slightly as she took in the details of the room.

“Yeah,” Joel agreed. “If you’re gonna camp, then camp.”

“Yep,” she nodded, crossing her arms, swiveling her head to face him, her expression conveying a ‘just so’ truth that badasses like them knew but kept secret from people less badass than themselves.“ But just between you and me, dude, I’d rather sleep in a bed than on the ground though.”

Joel chuckled and unbuckled his belt and worked one end of the leather out through the denim loops to slip his holster on. “Me too. But let’s keep that between us, alright?”

“Our secret is safe, pardner,” she drawled sweetly. She watched him adjust the holster slightly before rethreading the belt and securing it tightly. Her eyes drifted to his big hands working the buckle just above the fly of his jeans and memories of his hard cock jutting out from beneath the stretched cotton of his faded blue sweatpants flitted across her mind. She smiled and blushed a little, wishing he were wearing his sweats right now, wanting to see that tantalizing shape again. She knew guys had those things, but she’d never had much interest in them beyond simple curiosity until this man had come into her life. She wondered for the millionth time what it was about him that brought these feelings out in her. She sniffled and looked out the window, smiling mischievously. “So… We going somewhere?”

“Gonna check out those other cabins. Might be some supplies in ‘em.”

A puzzled look crossed Ellie’s face and she brought her gaze back to him, careful to keep her eyes on the parts of him above the neck.

“Didn’t we check them out when we got here? Did I dream that?”

“We poked our heads in ‘em,” he said, hefting his shotgun. “Or looked in through the windows. Just enough to make sure there wasn’t any assholes hidin’ in ‘em. But we didn’t really look around. You didn’t seem up for much scavengin’ work, kiddo.”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded, grinning and blushing, rubbing the back of her neck, her eyes on her shoes, trying to bring her hazy memories into focus. “Man, I must have been pretty out of it last night, huh?”

“A little,” Joel chuckled, checking the cylinder of his revolver before snugging it into his holster. “After that mess with the river and all those infected… You were just tuckered out, I reckon.”

Ellie shivered dramatically. “Man, I have never been so naked and so scared at the same time!”

Joel didn’t take the bait. He continued without comment. “Once we got out of there, we made good time. The road wasn’t too bad, most of the way. We made about seventy miles or so before we found this place. Not bad for all the detours we had to take.”

“Oh yeah. That’s right. We went around that town. All those little side roads and all those narrow old bridges. I remember it now.”

“Yeah. There were people living in that town. We saw the smoke from their campfires, remember?”

“Yeah,” she said, searching her memory for the name on the roadside sign. “Ottawa?”

“Ottumwa,” he corrected. “Some kind of settlement there, but who knows if they were crazy or not. Didn’t take the chance. So we got off 34 and took the long way around. We didn’t get back on 34 until we drove past that big park, remember?”

“Sort of,” she said, stretching out the words as she sifted through her mind. “I think I kept falling asleep.”

Joel fixed his eyes on her face, searching for any sign of a joke. “On the bike?”

“Yeah. I took a few naps back there.” She shrugged as though it were no big deal, which she could tell it wasn’t, not to him.

“Jesus, Ellie,” he said, exasperated. “Tell me if you’re gonna do that and I’ll pull over. What if you fell off? Jesus, kid.”

She raised her hands defensively, palms facing him. Her eyes frowned. She sniffled. “I didn’t. I tucked my arms under your backpack and the straps held me in place. That’s how I always do it when I take a nap back there.”

Joel boggled at this. “ _Christ_ , Ellie. You tryin’ to give me a heart attack? How much nappin’ do you do back there?”

Ellie worked the rug with the toe of her shoe. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans. “Not _much_. Jeez, Joel… Just, you know… Every now and then.”

Joel swiped at the air with the edge of his hand, a gesture of finality. This wasn’t a conversation they were going to have again. “Well, don’t do that no more, girl. I’m not kiddin’.”

She sniffled and crossed her arms in defiant cuteness, hoping to make a joke out of this suddenly tense exchange. “Yeah, well… Don’t leave me behind to float down the river, _naked_ , again and we’ll have a deal, Joel.”

Joel sighed and rubbed his temple. “Alright then. Go get dressed. We need to check those cabins out. If we’re gonna stay here today, we gotta make good use of our time.”

“We’re staying the day here?”

“We need to do an inventory. And you need to rest. Don’t want that sniffle turnin’ into somethin’ worse.”

“Okay. Cool,” she smiled warmly. “Can we maybe play some chess later?”

“Yeah, sure. Now go on, get dressed,” he said, looking out the window at the old, winding road that had brought them here the evening before. No one was out there. This was just another deserted part of a mostly-emptied out nation. It looked like it might rain later. Images of a naked, willing redhead girl continually danced through his mind. He cleared his throat and spoke to the girl who was turning to leave the room behind him. “Dress warm, okay?”

“Will do, buddy. Back in a flash!”

She was gone, basketballs shoes squeaking on the hardwood floor as she trotted to the smaller bedroom. He was alone for a few moments, but images of her remained with him, moaning and writhing beneath him, grunting his name, her young, virgin pussy taking every inch of him, persistent in his mind. He couldn’t shake the picture loose from his head. His nails dug into his forearm as he stood there, arms crossed, keeping a watchful eye on the road and hating himself.

She wants it, his cock whispered to him and he knew it was the truth.

Yeah, he admitted to himself. But I shouldn’t want her the way I do. Should’ve never kissed that girl and put such notions in that pretty head of hers.

**. . .**

She studied the black sports bra in her hand. She was naked from the waist up, her nipples hard from the cool air, her red flannel shirt folded neatly on the floor beside her as she knelt.

“Nah,” she giggled, dropping the bra and working her arm into the sleeve of the warm, soft flannel. She buttoned it up with nimble fingers. It felt good on her skin, as warm and soft as her whispering voice. “We’re not going anywhere today. It’ll be nice to go without a bra today. Let the girls off the leash for a while, as Riley used to say.”

A moment of worry suddenly clouded her lovely features and she shook her head to dispel it.

_Joel’s not mad at me. Not really. Probably shouldn’t have told him about the naps. I’m not even really asleep when I do it. Just sort of dozing a little. It gets boring back there sometimes, when there’s not much to look at except more empty highway and more rusty old cars and rotting houses. I can’t read back there. The batteries on my Walkman are almost dead. He ignores me when I shout jokes in his ears. What the fuck does he expect me to do?_

Half the contents of her backpack were on the floor now. She dug through the darkened interior of the waterproof green nylon, looking for something else warm to wear. She grimaced as she searched, her mind troubled.

_I swear, Joel. It’s so hard to deal with you sometimes. You’re lucky so you’re so good looking, buddy. If you didn’t have arms like you do and that sexy beard, I don’t know that I’d put up with you on mornings like this._

_Ah! Bingo!_

There it was. Brown, pink, and white. Tala’s windbreaker.

Worry slid across her face again.

_Tala… I hope you’re okay. I didn’t mean to steal this. I forgot it was in my pack when I gave the rest of your stuff back. I swear. I didn’t mean to keep this._

She stood up and slipped it on, leaving it unzipped.

_I hope you found the other people from your group, Tala. You seemed really nice. It’s way too hard out here to make it alone. I hope you’re not scared… or dead._

She squatted down and began to shove her stuff back into her backpack, knowing Joel wouldn’t want her leaving it lying around.

“What if banditos show up and we gotta hit the trail in a big ol’ hurry, little buckaroo?” she whispered to herself in a cartoonishly thick and deep Texas drawl, grinning as she did. “Y’all wouldn’t wanna gallop off and leave all your dang socks behind, now wouldya?”

She snickered and ran from the room, her full bag secure across her back again. She didn’t want to keep him waiting. Three minutes she’d been in this room and already she was missing him.

They were a team.

**. . .**

Joel was checking the magazine of his .45 when Ellie came around the corner at a quick jog. She was grinning, wearing the red flannel shirt she’d bought at Burlington and a three-color hoodie that he had never seen before.

“Ready to go, boss,” she smiled.

“Where did you get that jacket? You didn’t steal that from Bill, did you?”

She laughed, holding her arms out to the side, twisting this way and that to model it for him. “Admit it. I look better in it than his fat ass ever did.”

He chuckled as she trotted over to him. “You look like an ice cream sandwich, Ellie.”

She snortled, sniffing and snorting a laugh simultaneously. “A _what?_ ”

**. . .**

The day was cool. The full chill of winter was still months away, but the warm days of summer were few and far between now. The breeze dancing across the big lake made her shiver. She zipped her windbreaker up.

_Ice cream sandwich._

She tried to picture the treat he had described to her. Two chocolate cookies with three different flavors of ice cream in between. Strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate. Two round, flat cookies. Three big, heaping round scoops: Pink, white, and brown. All stacked on top of one another? How would you hold something that tall? Wouldn’t it wobble and stuff? How could you get it in your mouth? How would you eat it without the cookies crumbling apart or the big balls of ice cream falling out? It didn’t make any sense.

_Stuff was sort of like magic back then. Airplanes and chilidogs and people camping in tiny houses. Fuck, I wish I could go back there just for a day. Heck, just for an hour. Just long enough to eat an ice cream sandwich and go to an arcade._

Their feet crunched in the gravel as they made their way to the next cabin. The first two had been a bust. Empty of supplies and with no sign that anyone had been here since beginning of the outbreak.

Ellie read the sign at the edge of the parking lot. Tall grasses were growing all around it and twenty years of sun and rain hadn’t been kind to it, but the letters were still legible.

                         RED HAW LAKE  
                           STATE PARK  
          Department of Natural Resources

She pointed to the sign as they approached it. “You ever been here before?”

“No. “

“Oh,” she replied with a shrug, walking alongside him. “I thought maybe you and Tommy might have come through here on your fancy Harley road trip.”

“Nope,” he said bluntly, walking past the sign without slowing his stride. “We didn’t go this far north. We rode up from Texas to California and back through Oklahoma. Iowa ain’t anywhere in that loop, girl.”

“Oh. Yeah. Of course. Right. That makes sense.” The words fell out of her mouth too fast at first, then slowing to a soft stumbling of syllables. Ellie was still struggling with the concept of just how big the country was. Even studying the maps along the way, it was hard to grasp the sheer enormity of the world beyond the Boston walls. She slowed her pace imperceptibly, falling behind a step or two. Her eyes were on her shoes now, no longer looking around at the old park. She had pulled into herself slightly, hunching her shoulders a little. She tried not to frown but couldn’t help herself.

_First the ice cream sandwich and now this. Shit. Maybe I oughta keep my mouth shut for a while._

Joel heard the confusion in her voice and perhaps the sting of embarrassment. He had figured out early on that she didn’t like to appear dumb in front of him. She was happy to ask questions all day long, but accidentally revealing her own ignorance to him seemed to bother her greatly.

“Wellll… lemme think. I guess we probably came pretty close to these parts,” he said casually, careful not to sound patronizing. “Me and Tommy rode along I-10 to the coast and then we took I-40 back, as I recall. We’re on US 34 here, and that ain’t too far north of I-40. Heck, me and Tommy probably should’ve looked this place up. For a couple of hellraisers tired from a long day on the road, this might have been a real nice place to spend the night back then.”

“It still is,” she grinned, mollified, not fooled by his efforts to smooth out the dip she had stumbled into, but comforted by them all the same. She caught up in two quick strides and stayed close to his side as they crossed the parking lot to the other row of cabins.

Another cool breeze blew over the lake. Joel unrolled the sleeves of his brown flannel shirt, buttoning the cuffs at his wrists.

“Gonna be cold tonight,” Ellie said from her place at his side.

“You’re probably right,” he answered, glancing down at her with a reassuring look. “We ain’t gonna freeze though. Don’t you worry. It’s only October.”

_We’ll find a way to stay warm, Joel._

Let me warm her up, his cock whispered to him.

**. . .**

Someone had lived in the cabin nearest the lake for some time after the outbreak. All the blankets from the bunk beds were piled onto the large bed. The floor of the small shower stall bore the old grime of many sponge baths. The smaller bedroom was strewn with old trash. None of it food. Cardboard boxes and worn out clothes. Bras with broken straps, canvas boat shoes that had come apart at the edges from too much use. Some of the empty boxes were dog treats and flea collars. A pile of old towels in corner of the master bedroom told of a canine companion that had lived here once, long ago.

No food. No clothing. No ammunition. No useful supplies. Someone had lived here for several years and then left, taking everything of value with them.

A blue and black, zippered tote bag packed with money was in the small closet of the big bedroom, left behind with all the other worthless detritus.

Ellie pulled it out and sat in on the chest of drawers. She pulled two big handfuls of money out.

“How much do you think is in here?” she asked with wide eyes. Her mouth was round with astonishment. She knew this had once had great value.

Joel looked at the contents displayed through the open zipper of the bulging container. Twenties and tens in abundance. Fives and ones too, though fewer of these. The Citibank logo was printed on the side of the bag.

“Hmm… Fifty thousand? Maybe eighty thousand?” he mused, idly plucking a twenty dollar bill from the bag. Truth be told, before the outbreak, Joel had never seen money in such large amounts. After though, as the weeks stretched into months and things fell apart, money lost its value

“Coooool,” Ellie exhaled slowly, working the math, figuring out how many hotels and houses she could buy in Monopoly with this bag. “What would you buy with this much money, Joel?”

“Back in the day?” he asked, standing close enough that she could feel the warmth of his body.

“Mm-hm,” she nodded, smiling up at him, her hands still filled with cash.

“Hell, I woulda finished restoring that old El Camino in my backyard, I guess.”

“Yeah?”

“Then I woulda bought a fancy beach house in Corpus Christi,” he winked.

“One with bunkbeds?” she giggled.

“Sure, kiddo. We could hit the beach and work on our tans since you can’t swim.”

She cackled and leaned her head against him. He slipped his arm around her shoulder.

“Course,” he began in a sexy, low drawl, “you’d probably want it to be a topless beach. I know how you are, wild child. Runnin’ across that field without a damn stitch on, like you did, I don’t know how you ain’t got a cold today.”

She giggled and sniffled and nuzzled into him.

“You knowwwww,” she cooed, “our beach house doesn’t have to have bunk beds. With this kind of money, we could get one big, super nice bed. You know? Turn the other bedroom into a game room or something. Ooh! We could get a dart board.”

Joel eased away from her carefully, turning to hide his half-hard cock from young eyes. “I’d want a pool table. I ain’t much good at darts.”

“I like pool,” she said, wishing he’d come closer again, but he was already heading for the door. This cabin was a bust. Time to search the others. “We could play nine-ball, Joel.”

She was alone in the room.

“Seven ball?” she sighed.

**. . .**

All the other shacks were empty and disused. Somehow this little oasis south of US 34 had largely gone unnoticed by refugees during the collapse of society.

Ellie and Joel stood on the banks of the lake, watching the wind ripple the sparkling surface. It was just after midday now, and warmer than it had been before. Ellie had unzipped her jacket. Joel had undone the top few buttons of his flannel shirt, revealing the black t-shirt he wore underneath.

“Did you ever have that much money?” Ellie asked, unwilling to let the silence persist for long. She was a talker, this girl.

“Me and Tommy made a lot of money helpin’ to get the walls up in Austin,” he said, his eyes very faraway. “But by the time the job was done, the only thing the money was good for was wipin’ your ass. You wouldn’t believe how much stuff cost at the end. Hell, by the time we got to Houston a few years later, you couldn't even trade the stuff for the new ration cards FEDRA was issuin’ to folks.”

“You built the Austin QZ? No shit? Wow! That’s pretty cool, Joel.”

“Austin never got a QZ,” he said. “It was just a bunch of MSZs. But the last one they put up was practically a little QZ. Big wall and watchtowers and all that stuff. A fortress, yeah? But not big enough to be a QZ.”

“Still,” she said, slightly in awe of him, “anybody who built a zone must have got some pretty nice quarters. Did you and Tommy share a room? Or did you each get your own room?”

“I slept on a pew in a big church with about fifty other guys, squirt,” he said with a strange, sad smile and a small shake of his head. “I wasn’t important enough to get a bed in the new MSZ. I pretty much figured that out from the start. But I took the job anyway. Needed to get my hands on more money while it was still worth something.”

“Oh.” Her voice was small. She knitted her eyebrows, trying to make sense of the story, but perceptive enough to know that he wouldn’t share any more about this part of life. She sniffled.

He looked at her, reached out with his big hands, making her body tremble slightly with anticipation, and zipped up her windbreaker. She watched his big hands traveling up, so close to her body.

“Might want to put that hood up too, girl,” he said gently.

“Pfft,” she sniffled. “I’ll be fine.”

They stood there, side by side, the girl hoping the man would reach out and hold her hand, watching the rippling, glimmering lake. Minutes passed. She said nothing for as long as she could stand it.

“Where things any better in Houston?” she asked at last.

“Yeah. We’d been livin’ pretty good on our own down in La Grange for more than a year after we snuck out of Austin, before we set up camp outside of the new Houston QZ. Had that little town all to ourselves.” He sighed. “Lookin’ back on it, we should’ve stayed there longer. Tommy always said that La Grange was as good as it ever got. Lookin’ back on it, I’m startin’ to think maybe he was right about that.”

Ellie let the words roll around her mind for a minute before speaking again. “You snuck out of Austin?”

“The army don’t let you leave once you’re inside the fence. Don’t wanna risk you comin’ back contaminated.”

“Makes sense,” Ellie said. She took a risk and eased closer, pressing her arm against his. “So was La Grange another MSZ?”

“Nope. It was abandoned, kind of like Bill’s town. But not overrun with infected yet. Back then, all we had were runners. Clickers hadn’t come along yet.”

“Wow,” Ellie said without irony. “Good times.”

“Yeah,” Joel chuckled. “We didn’t know how good we had it. Hell, there was still electricity and the TV stations were still broadcasting. It was FEDRA propaganda, mostly. But we had a DVD player and lots of movies.”

“Nice,” Ellie grinned. She slipped her hand behind him, tucking her arm around his waist. His holstered gun was long and hard against her flank.

“It sure was,” he said. His hand squeezed her shoulder and she leaned her head against him. Her ponytail fluttered in the breeze. “We probably could’ve stayed there another year or so, but the power had gone out that fall and Matt finally ran out of jokes to keep us entertained, so when spring rolled around, we decided to pack up and look for greener pastures.”

“Do you still remember any of them?” she asked with a contented sniffle.

“Any of what?” Joel said.

“Any of the jokes,” she replied.

“Yeah. A few. But they’re pretty dirty. With Matt, you only had your choice of two kinds of jokes: dirty or tasteless.” His body rumbled with soft laughter and she delighted in the feel of it. “Or dirty and tasteless. He had a bunch of those too.”

“Tell me one,” she cooed. “Please?”

He waited, thinking, considering if he should.

“Pleeeeease?” she pleaded adorably, nuzzling in as close as she dared, suppressing a sniffle as best she could.

Joel sighed, conceding the battle.

“What’s six inches long and two inches wide and makes a woman squeal?”

Ellie giggled, guessing the punchline. A thrill ran through her body. “ _Joel!_ ”

“A hundred dollar bill,” Joel said.

“Oh! That’s not what I was thinking of _at all_ , dude.”

“Women used to love money, girl,” he explained with an understated mirth, smiling warmly, not pushing her away.

“Oh. Okay,” she said. A moment passed. “Why?”

“Shoulda told you a different one,” he sighed.

She giggled and wrapped her other arm around him, reaching across the front of his waist, clasping her hands together over his hip.

“I liked it,” she said.

**. . .**

Lunch was done. The last of the leftover eggs and the half a can of Spam were gone. They would have to cook something else for dinner tonight. There were still a few hours before sundown. They sat on the couch of the little cabin, reading paperbacks. Their guns were laying on the rug, freshly cleaned and oiled. Most of their belongings were down there too, both of their backpacks and the leather satchel Joel hung from the back of the Honda mostly emptied of their contents so they could take stock of their inventory. Food, water medical supplies, ammunition. Joel had said they were ‘sitting pretty’ now, with more than enough to get them to Wyoming comfortably.

Joel had given a silent prayer of thanks for the crazy, dead woman in Johnstown and her big stash of ammunition. He wished there’d been more room in the bike’s cargo boxes so that they could have rolled into Burlington with more ammo for trade. He’d taken all the shotgun ammo he could and even with all he’d spent in Burlington, there was still quite a bit left. He’d shot off a large amount of pistol ammo and rifle bullets yesterday when the small horde of infected had come rushing out of the woods, but he still had enough ammunition left to get to Tommy’s place.

He knew they should have been on their way by now. He set aside a few days for Ellie to recover from her adventure the day before, but somehow the girl hadn’t gotten sick from being naked and wet for half the day. She was fine and he knew they should be on the highway right now, rolling towards Tommy as fast as the Honda could manage on the shitty old road. But here they sat, him and the girl, reading the books that she had found in the bookmobile a few days before, back when they were still in Indiana.

Joel sat at one end of the sofa, Ellie at the other. Her jacket was off, wadded up on the armrest to serve as pillow for her head. She had taken her shoes off and was resting her feet in his lap. Her white socks were clean but dingy, no longer the crisp white cotton that she had found in the mall, before she sought out the Fireflies. She was whistling tunelessly and reading her book, some sort of legal drama with an embossed cover featuring a stature of the Roman goddess of justice on the cover. The folding chess set was on the small table in front of the couch. Four games. Joel had won all of them. Ellie was playing by the rules today. No ninjas. No black magic. She was trying to act like a grown up, though Joel didn’t know that. He did know that she wasn’t wearing a bra. Her reliance on ‘satellite surveillance’ had revealed that to him. She sighed, lost in her book, and stretched out a bit more, hooking her heels into the warm seam between his thighs. Joel wondered if they should spend tomorrow here too. Just in case. He didn’t want her getting sick by hitting the road too soon.

Get her to Tommy, he told himself.

Fuck her first, his cock grumbled, cramped inside his underwear, curled around and not even a quarter hard.

“Oh shit!” Ellie suddenly blurted out, sitting up, her feet dropping to the floor. “We shoulda got your watched fixed! Back in Burlington, you know? Damn, why didn’t I think of that?! I'm so stupid!”

“It’s okay, Ellie.”

“I woulda paid for it and everything, dude.”

“It’s alright. This old watch of mine has been broken a long time. I reckon I’m kind of used to it now, kiddo.” As soon as the words had left his mouth, he’d know he’d opened a door to something he kept locked up good and tight.

“Why do you still wear it then?” she asked.

“I just do. That’s all,” he said in a tone that had ‘turn back now’ blinking over it in neon letters ten feet high. Ellie knew this tone well.

Ellie considered her next move very carefully. She didn’t want to be in such a small place with a grumpy Joel stomping around.

“How’s the book?” she asked brightly, her own paperback resting in her lap as she tried to figure out if it was safe to put her feet in his lap again.

“Pretty good,” he said. “I remember watching the miniseries of this years ago. But I’d never read the book before.”

“Miniseries?” she asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s like a real long movie, but on TV, and they run a new part of it each night for a week.”

“All week? How long are these movies?”

“Ten hours or so, once it’s all done.”

“Wow.”

“Yep,” he said, stretching his arms. She seized the moment and slid closer to him. “Can’t watch ‘em all at once. Takes a week.”

“Neat,” she said, sadly not settling in against him. His arm had come down too soon to allow for that. She sat close instead, her knee against his. “So how’s the book? As good as the miniseries?”

“So far it’s not too bad,” he said, his thumb keeping his place between the pages. “‘Lonesome Dove’ was a one of the best cowboy stories ever told, you know.”

“Oh yeah? I picked it out because it had cowboys on the cover,” she grinned, quite pleased with herself. “Figured a Texan like you would enjoy that sort of stuff.”

“You figured right, girl,” he said, tousling her ponytail with his free hand.

She giggled and dared something new. She quickly swiveled in place on her butt and lay down, draping her shins on the armrest and resting her head in his lap. He looked down at her as though he didn’t quite believe she had done that.

“We should spend more time reading together,” she said, looking up at him with the most innocent face she could manage. “It’s good for your brain.”

Joel snorted and returned to his book. She giggled and looked up at him for a few moments. He was doing his best to ignore him so she happily returned to her book.

_I used to read to my Snoopy doll. I like to read to you too, Joel. Maybe tomorrow I can read another issue of Savage Starlight to you, like I did in that apple orchard._

**. . .**

“Gotta pee,” she said suddenly, sitting up. His lap had been warm and inviting. She hoped he would let her return to it later.

Joel didn’t get up at first. He was half hard, painfully constrained inside his underwear, and had been so for the last forty minutes. He busied himself checking his Taurus revolver while she pulled her shoes on.

He was getting up as she reached the door.

“Umm... Are you coming with?” she asked, an expression of cute confusion on her face.

“Just going as far as the picnic table, girl,” he said. “Close enough to hear you shout if there’s trouble, but you’ll still have plenty of privacy out in those trees. Don’t fret.”

“Trouble?” she teased as they stepped outside together. “People my age don’t have trouble with bathroom stuff. That’s for old people like y–“

“Hush,” he said, cutting her off. He tried hard not to smile.

She cackled and raced off into the forest behind the cabins on the other side of the parking lot. Flapping in her hand was a small loop of tissue paper that she’d taken from the jumbo roll of TP that he had found in Selby Stadium back in Ohio. He watched her run, fleet as a deer, and thought about how far they had traveled together.

“Don’t look!” she said, as she always did.

He smiled and waited by the picnic table. His erection began to fade and he reprimanded himself for not reminding her to take her jacket. It was getting colder as the day went on. She had dodged a bullet by not getting sick yesterday. There was no reason to let her press her luck like this. He had to take better care of her.

I’ll take care of her, it said to him, not whispering now that he was alone with it. She wants me. You want her. Why are you putting up such a fight?

Joel picked at the edge of the old table. The stain had weathered away and the wood was giving way to splinters.

Remember how you picked her up and carried her across that bridge yesterday? She was naked and shaking like a leaf, but she rested her head on your shoulder and let you carry her over all that broken glass and those dead bodies. She trusts you and she wants you and she’s dying for you to pick her up and carry her to the big bed tonight.

“That ain’t gonna happen,” Joel mumbled, his mind racing with the thoughts of being naked with Ellie under those covers when night fell in a few hours.

She’s a virgin, it reminded him. She wants it but she don’t know what to do with it. You can teach her. Train her to do it just how you like it. You know how she is. She loves learning new things. If you’re worried about her virginity, then teach her how to suck cock. No better way to pass the time.

“I’m not like that,” he muttered, his mind showing him a vision of Ellie between his legs as he reclined on the bed, her lips wrapped around his cock, letting him guide her through it, eager to please like she always was. She’d do a good job for him. She’d suck and lick and stroke until she coaxed all his come out. She wouldn’t stop until he told her to. She’d want to do it every day, he was sure of it. He stared out at the lake and watched a bird swoop down to pluck a small fish from the water. “I’m not like that.”

“All done,” she said from the other end of the parking lot. Her small feet crunched in the gravel as she approached. “Joel? You daydreaming, buddy?”

He turned to face her, hoping his partial erection wasn’t too prominent in his jeans. “Just thinkin’ about how many miles we need to cover tomorrow. And you ought to be wearin’ a jacket, little girl.”

She snorted challengingly. “I’m fine. My butt’s a little cold, I’ll admit. But I’ll warm up when we get back to the sofa.”

She smiled, sniffled, and took his hand in both of hers, pulling him towards the little cabin.

**. . .**

“Come on. We’re gonna run out of daylight in a few hours. These are prime reading hours, dude.”

She sat in the middle of the sofa, looking at him adoringly, affectionately, watching him as he stood in the kitchen, setting out a can of beef stew next to the little camp stove.

“Just getting everything ready for dinner. Before it gets dark, we’ll eat and then turn in,” he said.

“Sounds like a plan. Now get over here. Your lap is warm and I miss it,” she grinned. She was in love. She wanted to hide it, but she wasn’t doing a very good job of it.

Joel crossed the room and she scooted over on the sofa cushions to make room for him, both of their books in her lap.

“Why don’t you get comfy on the sofa and I’ll get these guns and stuff put away.”

“We can do that later,” she insisted sweetly. “C’mon, Joel. Let’s read together.”

He walked over to her and reached around her, taking the blanket from the back of the sofa. She looked up at him with loving eyes and wished he would kiss her. He wrapped the blanket around her shoulders instead.

“Get cozy and enjoy your book, girl,” he said. “I won’t take long with this.”

“Fine,” she sighed dramatically with a roll of her eyes. “Be that way.”

She lay down on the couch, curled up and snug under the blanket, and watched him work, her head poking out above the warm wrap, a cute redheaded burrito.

Joel sat down on the floor and sorted their food into piles. A small pile for each backpack, a larger pile for the new satchel, another large pile for the saddlebag of the Honda, the one not full of tools and fluids. Their canteens were full, as were their small plastic water bottles and the pair of larger two-liter soda bottles. They’d filled them from the lake earlier. They had enough water for a couple of days. The larger bottles he put in the satchel, the smaller bottles and the canteens he split evenly between the packs. Ammunition was somewhat plentiful, though not nearly as much as they’d had before that horde of infected had found them at the farm. Hopefully, these supplies would be enough to see them through the last week or so that separated them from Wyoming. He placed her ammo in front of her backpack. He had more guns than her and more ammo as a result. Some of it he placed by his pack, making sure he had a little of everything he might need, the rest went in the pile for the Honda’s cargo box.

She sniffled and watched him with a warm smile. There was more warmth waiting for him under the blanket. She hugged herself, ready and eager for him to return to her.

_I’m going to kiss you in a minute, Joel. Don’t even try to stop me._

He got up, brushed his hands across his rump and went to the poofy brown leather chair instead.

“What are you doing, Joel?” she asked in a small voice. This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen. She had it all planned out in her head and it started with him getting under this blanket with her.

_Come here. I want to snuggle with you._

“You looked too comfortable. Didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, settling in among the thick cushions of the chair.

The old leather creaked and Joel sighed in a way that made Ellie’s heart ache. He was supposed to make that sound with her, not some stupid chair.

_Do I have to do everything fucking thing myself?_

She got up, the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders, and danced across the floor lightly, stepping carefully around the neat piles Joel had stacked up around their packs, her socked feet making soft whispers of sound on the old rug. She stopped at the side of the big leather chair and gazed down at Joel with warm, green eyes.

“Come on. There’s room on the sofa,” she said invitingly.

“Why don’t you stretch out over there,” he said. “Nice warm spot of sun on that couch right now.”

“We can both stretch out,” she insisted. “You can’t stretch out in that dumb old chair. C’mon.”

He cocked an eyebrow and reached for a lever on the side of the chair. The back of the chair tilted back slightly as the lower front of the chair flipped up and out on metal scissor arms, making a small rectangular platform for his feet as he settled back, smiling smugly.

“No way,” she breathed in awe. “How the heck did you do that?”

In her confounded state of mind, she had forgotten to cuss for maximum effect.

“La-Z-Boy,” he said, as though that explained everything. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“This is the most awesome chair I have ever seen,” she whispered, almost speechless.

Joel pulled the lever again and the chair became a bed.

“Oh man!” she squeaked in astonishment. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, blown away by the wonders of the old world. She giggled wildly. This was the best magic trick she had ever seen. “Does it fly too? Or float? Can we take it out on the lake?”

He laughed and settled in with a smug snort. “If it had wheels, I’d drive this baby all the way to Wyoming. Nothin’ like a genuine La-Z-Boy, girl.”

“Permission to come aboard, Cap’n,” she said, climbing over the armrest to join him before he could move to stop her.

“Ellie –“ he began.

“Shh!” she snickered, draping herself atop him, settling in with a shiver, pulling the blanket around them. “Getting comfy.”

“Ellie,” he said, one hand on her shoulder.

“If you push me out of this magic chair, you big jerk, I’m going to cry,” she said, giggling, and tucking her head in beneath his chin.

He lay there, tense, for a few moments before finally surrendering to the moment. Beneath the blanket, he wrapped an arm around her waist and she wiggled closer to him. His other hand found a spot to rest on her upper back, between her shoulder blades, warm under the quilt.

“See?” she said with a hint of triumph in her voice. “This is nice.”

“Yeah,” he said, trying to think of every shitty construction job he’d ever had, using every mental trick at his disposal to keep from getting an erection. Her warm, soft body pressed so deliciously against him made it incredibly difficult. She squirmed again, making a wonderful friction between them. His cock stirred just a little, refusing to obey him. “This is pretty nice.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she cooed and nuzzled her cheek against his collarbone. “You smell good.”

“It’s the fancy Motel 6 soap I’ve been usin’. Its drives the ladies wild.”

“It sure does,” she purred. She wiggled and shifted, placing her hands on his chest, bringing herself up to face him. “So…”

The word hung in the air between them.

He said nothing, only raising an eyebrow.

“Tell me a story,” she said, an impish smile on her unlined face. Her fingers were laced together just above her breasts, her palms feeling his chest rise and fall with each breath.

“What sort of story?” he asked warily.

“Tell me about Princess Leia wearing that slave girl’s outfit. Tell me about how she danced for Han Solo at the end of that movie.”

“You’ve already heard that story,” he said carefully, prompting her to stick her tongue out at him. So close to his face, it was unbearably erotic to him.

“Then tell me something else. Tell me about you and Tommy. Tell me about La Grange, or how you got from Texas to Boston. Tell me another one of Matt’s jokes.”

Joel chuckled and Ellie loved how it felt against her body.

“Alright,” he said. “Lemme see… Okay… Why does the Easter Bunny hide all those eggs?”

She grinned, hoping it would be a dirty joke. “I don’t know. Why?”

“So nobody finds out he’s been fucking all the chickens.”

She laughed and dipped low, kissing him lightly. A little peck. Their lips made a soft smacking noise as they parted.

“Tell me another one. A dirty one.”

“I don’t know if I remember any dirty ones, kiddo.” His cock was only barely in check now. It wanted to spring up, hard and ready for this girl. It wouldn’t stay soft much longer if they kept acting like this.

“ _Come on_ , Joel. A dirty one. A really dirty one.” Her eyes sparkled and her breasts made a nice line of cleavage at the neck of her shirt, just inside the edge of his vision. “Tell me one. Please?”

He knew he shouldn’t, but he spoke anyway.

“Why do men have two heads and women have two mouths?”

She smiled and leaned in excitedly. She whispered sexily to him. “Why?”

“Because men do all the thinking and women do all the talking.”

“Fuck you, you ass,” she snickered and kissed him again, quickly and sweetly, with a closed mouth. Adorably chaste. “One more. A really, really dirty one this time.”

“What do a puppy and a gynecologist who lost his glasses have in common?”

She tittered, a high noise that he had never heard her make before. Her voice was a giggly squeak. “What?”

“They both have a wet nose.”

She cackled and kissed him again, another small, honey-sweet peck. He hugged her close and they lay there, cheek to cheek. She wondered if he could tell that her nipples were hard. He hoped she couldn’t feel his stiffening member. They kissed again, softly, not deeply at all, but slow and gentle, mouths almost closed. Ellie was a virgin. Joel wanted to keep her that way, no matter what sort of ideas his cock was suggesting to him. Her own body was sending her notions too, ones his cock would certainly appreciate.

**. . .**

“So what did you do?” she purred, snuggling close to him, warm and safe in his arms.

“Kid, I tell you, I looked everywhere. From one end of that site to the other,” Joel said idly playing with her ponytail, enjoying the feel of her hot breath on his jaw. “Peters was gonna be there soon and the last thing I needed was for Tommy to have skipped out early, just cause he thought the foreman was gone for the day. That job paid damn good and I had bills up to here.”

“Up to where?” she giggled.

He placed the edge of his hand on her cheekbone and she giggled prettily.

“About up to here, if I recall correctly,” he said, his voice a low, sexy drawl; hot breath tickling the crown of her head.

She looked up at him longingly and he inclined his head to kiss her again. She sniffled quickly and received his lips ardently. His tongue danced at the edge of her teeth and she met it with the wet, pink tip of her own. She wanted him to explore her mouth more deeply, parting her lips, opening up to him, but he pulled away gently.

“You want to hear the rest of this story or not, Miss Sniffles?” he teased.

“I do,” she beamed at him radiantly, her lips parted and ready.

“Then stop trying to distract me like that.”

“But I like kissing during story time too. Can’t I have both?” Her white teeth flashed at him in the softening rays of the late day sun.

“One or the other,” he said with cavalier smirk. “I’m too old to do two things at once.”

She shifted a little, pulling her body up, until she was looking down at him.

“Then maybe we’d better kiss. Keep it simple for you.”

He smiled in that cocky, lopsided way that made her heart leap up in her chest.

“My story that borin’?”

“No,” she cooed. “But I can guess how it ends. Tommy ran off with that girl he was flirting with, right?”

“She was the foreman’s daughter,” Joel husked, pulling her down for a gentle kiss. “And he didn’t run off… I found him fuckin’ her in the foreman’s shack.”

Ellie’s eyes widened. “Right there on the site?”

“Yep,” Joel said. He reached up, placing his thumb on the little dip between the bottom of her lip and the little knob of her chin. She leaned close, her face almost touching his as he spoke in a growl that sent ripples of liquid fire surging through her pussy. “He was fuckin’ her good and hard on Peter’s desk when I walked in on ‘em.”

She gasped. He opened her mouth and covered her lips with his own. His tongue slipped into her mouth, kissing her more deeply than he ever had before. She closed her eyes and groaned into his mouth, a womanly sound working its way up from the core of a girl’s body.

He worked her hair free from her ponytail, keeping the elastic band on his finger like a ring. Her hair fell around them, tinting the world a wonderful shade of crimson.

**. . .**

For a while, she forgot all about the cure and the Fireflies, Marlene and Riley, Tess and Tala, Henry and Sam. Boston ceased to exist and Wyoming was a faraway land that could only be found in myth. The Honda outside was the stuff of legend. The only real thing was this comfy, magical chair and this man who held her close, warming her better than the quilt could, the hard thing between his legs pressed against her, hot and insistent, whispering to the parts of her that were ready to do the things she had been dreaming about so often lately. She kissed him, their tongues slipping and sliding together, her thighs wrapped around his hips, the hot mound of her swollen pussy pushing against the long, firm shape in his pants, khaki on denim, her hips knowing what to do even if she didn’t, rocking back and forth slowly, so slowly, grinding herself against him, her body finding the rhythm of sexual union somewhere in her DNA, an old dance that everyone knew. Even scared, trembling virgins like her.

Joel eased her face away from his. She groaned and opened her eyes. The daylight was fading. Sundown was almost here. Had they spent an hour kissing? Where had the time gone? Why were things moving so fast all of a sudden? He reached up and brushed her hair over her shoulder to see her better.

“…joel…” she gasped, panting. She realized she was still squeezing his hips with her thighs, grinding her khaki-covered pussy against his hard-on. “…oh man…”

“We gotta stop, Ellie,” he husked.

“no” Barely a word at all. Not enough breath in her body to form it properly. Her eyes tried to focus on him. She was shaking, his arms still around her. “keep going”

He eased her back, until she was sitting in his lap. She collected her hair and let it fall behind her neck, out of the way. Her mouth missed his, but her pussy thanked him for it. He was hard against her, and she was feeling more then just the tip of it now. She groaned. It seemed enormous to her now.

_I want it inside me._

“lets get undressed’ she murmured, a lustful smile on her full, kiss-swollen lips. “c’mon”

His big hands were on her waist, holding her in place firmly, keeping her lips a safe distance from his. She wiggled a bit in his grip, testing the limits of it. Her pussy thanked her for that too.

“youre so strong” she sighed. “lets get undressed… okay?”

“We need to stop while we still can,” he said tightly.

“betcha you could rip my clothes right off me,” she giggled breathily, control of her voice coming back to her slowly. “couldn’t you? I couldn’t stop you…”

“Ellie.”

“I want you to, you know.”

Joel swallowed hard and set his mouth in as serious a line as he could manage. The heat coming off her crotch was like a fire to him. His cock was straining against her concealed pussy. He knew she had to feel it. He could feel the softness of her mound whenever she shifted around on top of him.

“Rip this new shirt off?” he teased, fluffing the untucked flannel a little. “But you just bought it.”

“We’ll go back to Burlington,” she giggled softly, her eyelids heavy. “I’ll buy a hundred shirts. You can rip all of them off me. I don’t mind.”

“I don’t know, girl,” he spoke in a low, teasing husk, stoking the fire in her loins with the timbre of his voice. His fingers slid to the bottom of her flannel shirt, the two halves of the fabric that hung low now, just in front of her pussy, and began to work free the button there. “It’d be a real shame if anything happened to your nice new shirt.”

Ellie held her breath. She didn’t even sniffle. Her whole body went tense. Her pussy throbbed and ached against the hard bulge she was sitting on. Her panties were wet. She could feel them. Soaking wet.

One button. Slowly. Two. Her navel was exposed now. Slowly. Three. Almost to her breasts. Slow. Four. Her nipples began to tingle, so near his hands. One button to go now. Slowly, slowly. Fiv-

She squeaked and her hands clamped down over his, holding them against her. It felt so good. He was practically touching her breasts. Her eyes were wide, white showing all the way around. It felt great. Why had she stopped him? She couldn’t remember. Her mind raced but she came up with nothing. Her hands refused to move. She gulped.

He studied her, concerned and not displeased.

“You want to slow down?” he drawled smoothly, his eyes soft and gentle for her.

“N-no!” she blurted out, a bit too loudly, shaking her head for emphasis.

“Then…” he said, his eyes half closed, not mocking her despite how silly she looked with the wild, deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face. “You don’t want me to see them? That’s fine.”

“Dude!” she grumbled defensively, drawing in on herself a little, suddenly a bit shy. “There’s nothing to _see!_ ”

He didn’t tease. He didn’t rebuke or push. His nodded and his hands slid down to her belly, letting her hold on to the last button like it was a piece of driftwood keeping her from drowning in an ocean she still didn’t quite understand. She moaned a little. His hands felt so good on her belly. There was a fire beneath her skin and his touch fed it so easily. The muscles of her stomach tensed. A minute later, they went slack, her tummy soft and pliant against his gently caressing hands.

“God… that feels so good,” she groaned.

“See? … We ain’t in any hurry, Ellie… There’s no rush at all.” He spoke slowly, in a low, deep tone that soothed her to the tips of her toes.

“I mean…” she muttered, exasperated with herself, shocked to discover she was such a big chicken after the brave bullshit talk she’d spouted only a few minutes before. “I wish I had something to show you… I… Mmm… That feels so good…”

His hands worked around to her back, fingertips testing the edge of her cargo pants, feeling the warm skin beneath, the narrow strip of flesh just above the elastic band of her underwear.

“oohhhh…” she groaned.

He worked his way up her lower back. She leaned back, pressing against his hands. Her pussy was scalding hot now, pulsing with desire for the hard thing she was still sitting on. His hands slipped around, caressing her flanks, the curves above her hips, moving slowly up to the ticklish skin of her ribs.

“…mmmm…” she moaned.

Under her arms, his fingertips gliding through the little tufts of hair there. Around front, the pads of his fingers tracing lightly across the tops of her breasts. Down now, along the outside of her small, soft mounds, thumbs fanning out, almost brushing the achingly sensitive edges of her areolas. Her nipples, already hard, began to throb and pulse.

“…oh god….”

Cupping her small, tender breasts. She arched her back, pressing them into his rough palms. He held them, lifting them a little, squeezing them. Her nipples brushed against the fabric of her shirt and she shuddered.

“oh fuck… Mmm…”

Her head lolled back, her mouth open. Waves of heat escaped her lips. His thick index fingers rolled her nipples back and forth and she cried out softly, gripping his hips with the inside of her thighs.

“God, Joel… that’s soooooo good…”

“Unbutton your shirt, Ellie,” he whispered.

She blinked and looked down at him, at his hands, at the front of her shirt hanging open loosely, held shut by a single button, a token effort that would have only barely hid her breasts if they weren’t already covered by his hands. Her mouth was open and her fingers were shaking as she worked the last button free. The red flannel fell open and she was revealed to him. She smiled down at him, her cheeks a bright red, her eyelids flushed, her bottom lip tucked anxiously between her teeth. Shy. Lusty. Virginal.

_Say something. I’m showing you my boobs. Say something, Joel. Tell me I’m pretty._

“Damn, Ellie,” Joel drawled, dragging his eyes away from her bare skin, from the small, delicate shapes he held, to look her in the eye. “You are gorgeous, girl.”

She smiled down at him, as in love as she had ever been, as any girl could be. She wanted to tell him. She needed him to know. She loved him. She would love him forever.

“Jo-“ she began.

He caught her nipples between his knuckles and pinched them.

“AH!” she exclaimed. “NNnng!”

He twisted them gently, slowly.

“Oh fuck! Oh man oh man oh man!” Desperate. Yearning. Delighted.

“Want me to stop?” Low, husky, teasing, sexy as hell.

“Don’t _even!_ ” she grunted.

He twisted and tugged at the hard pink rocks in his fingers. She groaned and squealed, luxuriating in it. Her breasts were small, but she wasn’t flat-chested. He’d been with an Asian girl once who had breasts about this size, and she’d been a grown woman, two years older than him at the time. This girl was enough of a woman for him to pretend that this wasn’t wrong, for a little while at least.

“Nnnn!” she grunted as he pulled at them. “Fuck! _Mmm!_ ”

He pinched her nipples between the pads of his thumbs and the second knuckles of his curled index fingers, bracing the edges of his hands against the bottom of her breasts, pivoting his wrists, pressing his pinky fingers into her flesh, levering the tops of his hands outward, stretching her breasts, bending them slightly over his knuckles, tugging hard.

“AH! JOEL!” she wailed in wonderful torment.

Keeping her nipples tightly pinched between his fingers, he pulled his large hands away until he made small, taut, aching cones of her breasts.

“GOD!” Too loud? Too needy? She didn’t know. She didn’t care!

“Get down here, girl,” he growled. “Slow.”

She obeyed, letting him pull her down to him by her tits, inch by slow inch, wailing softly, erotically, the whole way. Tears were in the corner of her eyes, a mixture of pain, love, and surrender rising up to glisten in the orange band of sunlight stretching out across them. They kissed, his tongue probing deeply in her mouth, never letting up the pressure on her aching nipples. She writhed and moaned, exulting in the gentle abuse, making as much room as she could for his tongue. Ellie grunted and squirmed, her cunt pumping out waves of scalding heat. She was sure her new pants would burst into flames at any moment. Unseen electricity sparked and sprayed from the tips of her breasts, enough to jumpstart the Honda, she was sure of it. Could you come just from having your tits pinched? She didn’t know. She was dying to find out.

Harder and harder, he squeezed, his fists smooshing her tortured breasts flat against her chest as she lay on top of him, pressing down, wriggling and writhing, She could feel an orgasm coalescing at the heart of her swollen clitoris, protruding from its hood, hard like he was, the sensitive nub brushing against the cotton of her panties, pinned against the hard cock pressing against her steaming hot pussy. She needed it, needed it more than she find the words for, needed to come before she exploded from it, but her nipples were killing her, it was too much and not enough at the same time. She turned her head, breaking the seal of their lips and cried out softly.

“Joel,” she almost sobbed. “Please! Ow!”

“A little bit more, gorgeous,” he hissed into her ear.

“Oh God.” Her body was starting to shake. She was right there. Right. There. Her voice was strained and high in his ear. “Joel. _Please_.”

He compressed them just a little more than she could bear, and then released them without warning. She gasped, her body going rigid. Sensation came rushing back into the swollen, aching rock-hard pink tips of her abused breasts.

“ _Oh Jesus_ ,” she grunted, overwhelmed at how intense it felt, like nothing she had ever experienced with Riley. Mean and kind of cruel, but in the best way possible. Her clit tingled and pulsed, almost to the point of climax. Almost. Almost. Fucking almost.

His strong hands slipped under her arms, and pulled her to him tightly, dragging her bare chest along the front of his shirt, her nipples exploding with agonized joy as she went. Her short journey ended in a kiss and she melted into him, deliriously close to the edge of an orgasm. She trembled and moaned against him, her arms and legs going limp. Her pussy throbbed, unhinged in its desperate need for this man, demanding a release she was too nervous to ask for. She hoped he could read her mind.

Finally he lifted her up, his powerful hands supporting her, the skin of her underarms sweaty against his rough palms. Her shirt hung open. Her breasts tingled, hanging ripe for him to see.

“oh god joel” she mumbled, trying to catch her breath, her eyes mostly closed and wet at the edges.

“Told you you can’t beat a La-Z-Boy,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

She giggled, trembling in his arms. She licked her lips. “Bring me down there and let me kiss you again.”

“Better not,” he said firmly. “Any more and this is gonna go farther than it should.”

“Please, Joel,” she grinned, yearning to feel the fabric of his shirt against her swollen breasts again. Her nipples hurt in a way that she wanted to savor for as long as she could. “I wanna kiss you, dude. Don’t be a butt.”

He chuckled and eased her away, until she was sitting in his lap again.

“Nononono,” she protested adorably as he sat her in place. “C’mon, Joel. Let’s kiss. It’s not dark yet. We can light the water lamp. It’ll be _romantic_ and stuff.”

“We need to make dinner and get in bed,”

“Okay! Sure!” she said with sudden enthusiasm. “The big bed, right?”

“Ellie, don’t make this harder than it is.”

“But it _is_ hard,” she giggled, shimming her hips, grinding herself against his cock, making him try to swallow a groan unsuccessfully. “I can tell, dude.”

“Ellie,” he warned.

“The big bed,” she persisted. “We can cuddle up. We don’t have to… _you know_.” She grinned shyly, wildly. “We don’t have to _do it_. We can just snuggle up and be warm together tonight. Naked too. We should get naked. That’s what we should do, okay?”

He fixed her with hard eyes and said nothing.

She held her breath and slid her shirt off, letting it fall around her butt and his thighs. There she was. All for him.

“You’re hard as a rock, Joel. I know you want to,” she said, trying to be bold but blushing and trembling instead. “… don’t you?”

“You know I do,” he growled.

“So do I,” she grinned, placing her hands on his stomach, delighted at how hard his muscles were.

He stared at her, his hands on her hips, and said nothing for a long minute.

“Can we?” she whispered, her voice trembling as much as her body.

“Is your pussy wet, Ellie?” he asked in a rumbling husk.

She squeaked, stunned into silence. She opened her mouth. No words came out. She closed her mouth, her emerald eyes wide and glistening. She nodded mutely, a million butterflies in her stomach.

“yes,” she whispered in a voice so quiet it didn’t carry as far as the kitchen. But Joel heard it. She saw the sly smile appear on his face. She tried to smile. She stopped holding her breath and sniffled.

**. . .**

His cock erupted and Joel grunted. It rocketed out of him, pent up lust escaping in thick, white jets. His swollen balls pulled tight against his body, pulsating as they emptied themselves in a series of powerful spasms. He would be sore as hell tomorrow.

“F-fuck,” he grunted, trying to keep his voice low. He didn’t want to speak at all, but he couldn’t help it. He hadn’t come since that night in the wildlife preserve back in Indiana. Four nights of dirty dreams, four days of rolling highway, passing the time with increasingly detailed sexual fantasies, each of them about that devoted, eager redhead. Seeing her tits, touching them, hearing her make those sounds. It had been too much. He couldn’t stop himself. He had hoped that after dinner he would be in his right mind, but she only buttoned up her shirt halfway when they got out of the recliner. She had helped him make dinner, her little tits jiggling around inside that plunging neckline, smiling and laughing, in love in that way a virgin always loves her first man. She would be down for anything he asked her to do, he was certain of it. She had sat next to him at the dinner table, bringing her plate and chair around, cozying up. Her foot had played with his leg under the table. Every time he turned to say something to her, her boobs were there, half on display inside that shirt. She knew he kept looking. She giggled and blushed. She wanted him to see them. No matter what they talked about, she always turned the conversation to the coming night and reminded him once or twice or twenty times about what a good idea it would be for them to get in that big bed together, naked.

It was a good idea, he admitted to himself. The best idea he’d heard in ages.

That’s why he’d grabbed the big roll of toilet paper and told her he had some business in the tree line. She was waiting out there, somewhere by the picnic table next to their little cabin.

He’d jacked off dry, not willing to risk getting the small bottle of baby oil from his backpack.

His throbbing cock pumped out the last few, dwindling spurts of steaming hot jizz onto the bark of the old paper birch tree. It dripped and oozed from the split, thin, curling bark of the narrow trunk.

“Ch-christ,” he gasped. He hadn’t come so hard in years. He’d had blue balls for hours today. Everything was sore down there now. He was already dreading having to stuff his poor nuts back into his underwear.

He wiped his cock off with a wad of paper and tried to forget about her exquisite little titties and her warm, firm belly. But the images wouldn’t go. Her cries of passion echoed in his ears.

Shouldn’t have told her that story about Tommy, he chastised himself, his thoughts a cooling mess of lust and guilt now. Should’ve known it was just gonna turn her on.

That’s why you told her, his cock snickered.

He winced and strained, until piss began to splash across the bark, removing the evidence. He could feel the heat of it in the cool, near-dark air.

“Dumb ass,” he grunted. “What the fuck is wrong with you, you sick fucker. She’s a little girl.”

In his mind’s eye, it was yesterday. She was naked, running across the field to him, laughing, full of joy, oblivious to the bodies of the dead infected up on the low hill, scattered along the old gravel road. Her clothes and her towel were in her hands, her small feet flying through the tall grass, her little breasts bouncing with each swing of her toned legs, her auburn hair trailing behind her like a ribbon, a match in color for the red triangle at the top of her creamy white thighs, curls that hid less and less of her tender pussy the closer she came to him. When she reached him and her backpack, he could see those sweet little lips peeking out at him from behind the glossy hair. Had she seen him looking at it? She had been blushing so hard, giggling nervously, her eyes on her backpack and the safety of the clothes inside it. She didn’t even look at him as she ran the last twenty steps, suddenly too shy to see him seeing her. Her body was flushed a rosy pink as she knelt to open the pack, the white cheeks of her ass round and inviting. His cock had been so hard he was amazed it hadn’t ripped right through those old sweat pants.

“A bush don’t make her a woman,” he reminded himself, shaking the last of the piss from his fat but softening cock. “Don’t matter how sweet her pussy looks.”

He zipped his pants up, wincing, taking a moment to collect himself before heading back to her. He looked around. The stars were already coming out. If they hurried, they’d have just enough time to brush their teeth and get in bed before they needed the lamp.

He sighed deeply, knowing how much worse he’d made things tonight.

“Jesus, girl… You’ve got one damn fine body… Wish to hell I’d never seen it.”

He turned at began the trek back to the cabin, muttering beneath the darkening sky.

“Goddamnit.”

**. . .**

Ellie sat on the bench of the old picnic table, wondering what the hell was taking him so long. She had carved ‘J + E’ into the old picnic table with her switchblade while she waited. She traced the shallow letters with the tip of her knife. Her pistol waited on the table next to her elbow.

The crunch of boots in gravel. She looked up. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

“You must have really had to go,” she teased.

“Started out as a number one. Turned into a number two,” he joked. “Must have been those powdered eggs. They really wanted to come out.”

“Eew. No details, thanks,” she snickered, rising to meet him as he approached, a kiss for him ready on her lips.

He stopped and she placed her hands behind his neck, rising up on her toes for a quick smooch. It warmed both of them against the chilly night air. His hands slid down to cup her ass.

She giggled and whispered into his ear. “You washed your hands, right?”

**. . .**

Ellie lay in the darkness, wrapped up and warm in the top bunk. This was not how things were supposed to turn out tonight. She sighed in disappointment. Below her, Joel was snoring softly, under a blanket of his suddenly inflexible morality.

_Asshole. You can be a hunter. You can be a smuggler. But you can’t have sex with a teenager. Dick._

She wasn’t sleeping well tonight. A dirty dream about Joel had turned into a dirty dream about Riley. That dream had turned into a weird, surreal vision: she and Riley, both stalkers, running through the old mall, playing and having fun. Then Marlene had found them and the two of them had charged at her and pulled the woman down, tearing her apart and laughing while they did it, covered in sprays of blood. It was the most fun a pair of infected teenage girls could possibly have. She had awoken, smiling with joy. The feeling had quickly turned to dread as she remembered the details of it, and she had cried softly into her pillow for a while.

_I’m gonna have my damn period soon. I always have fucked up dreams before my period starts._

She sighed sadly and wondered if any of the soreness in her belly was from anything other than the miserable experience she had in that river yesterday.

_Guys are lucky. They never have to deal with shit like this._

_You’re lucky, Joel. You oughta take that stick out of your ass sometimes and enjoy life. It’s short, you know. Really fucking short._

She sighed again, still unsettled by the dream.

_Riley._

_I promise it won’t be for nothing, Riley. I swear it._

Joel was snoring softly as she climbed down from the top bunk, careful not to place her foot on his mattress as she descended.

She scooped up her backpack and his big Colt .45 from the little chest of drawers and slipped out of the room as quietly as she could.

Out in the hallway, she eased the door shut and tiptoed down the hallway, her flashlight leading the way.

In the small living room, she sat in the darkness with the blanket wrapped around her. She sat on the sofa. She didn’t want to sit in the recliner with Joel. It might erase the edges of that perfect memory in her mind.

She carefully took the stuff out her pack that he had set aside for her, placing it all on the table. There were a few items in her pack that he didn’t know about, hidden down beneath her clothes and her green blanket. She unfolded the letter and read it in the darkness.

“‘Find your purpose and fight for it’,” she read aloud, quiet as a mouse.

She closed her eyes and hoped her mom could send a little strength her way.

“It’s so confusing and scary out here, Mom,” she whispered. “I’m trying. I promise I’m trying. Just…if you could…just send me a little help, okay? I could use it.”

She folded the letter back up carefully and sealed it inside the protection of the Ziploc bag. She placed it back in the back, safe and sound at the bottom. She tucked her treasured copy of Playboy magazine and her issues of Savage Starlight in on top of it. She weighed the can of crushed pineapple in her hand, heavy and cold. She had stolen it from Frank’s house, back in Massachusetts; the day she and Joel had found the truck that had carried them only as far as Pittsburgh. She had originally planned to share it with Joel on the day they found the Fireflies.

She reconsidered that plan as she studied the squat, round metal can.

“I’m gonna open you the night Joel and I have sex, Mr. Pineapples.” She grinned in the darkness. She was ready for her period to hit just to get it out of the way. Most guys wouldn’t go near you when you were bleeding. That’s what Riley had said. And with CBI in her blood? You couldn’t get it from kissing… but there was no way Joel was going to touch her if blood was involved. Too risky.

“Hopefully, Mr. Pineapples,” she confided to the cold can of fruit, “neither one of us will have to wait much longer.”

She giggled and ran her fingertip around the folded metal edge of the lid.

She stopped. A puzzled look fell over her face.

There was a hidden seam under the lip of the metal.

She held the light close to it, sharp eyes looking for clues.

“What the heck is this?” she whispered. “Has this been opened or something?”

That didn’t make sense. The can was heavy, full. It never leaked. And she knew that can openers left a cut on the top of the lid, not on the side of the can, tucked up under the metal lip.

She tucked the flashlight under her chin, holding it in place against her neck while she held the can in one hand and grasped the edges of the lid with the other.

She clenched her fingers and tried to turn the lid. Nothing.

She looked at it again, holding it close to her face, wondering if it was really a seam she had seen there, or if she had been mistaken.

There it was, narrow and hidden from anything short of a determined inspection: A seam.

Certain of it now, she tried to twist the lid off again. She strained. It hadn’t been opened in a long, long time, maybe. Or more likely, Frank was the one who had screwed the lid closed with a grip much stronger than that of a teenage girl.

She gritted her teeth and turned with all her might.

“Come… on… you… fucker…” she hissed.

Suddenly the soft squeal of metal on metal. It moved! Half a turn. Then a full one. Then another. Half of one turn more and the lid lifted away easily, unscrewed, revealing the contents of the can. It wasn’t crushed pineapple.

Ellie looked at it in the darkness. She sat the lid down on the sofa next to her and took the flashlight, shining it into the can and the carefully packed thing within. She silently read the neatly printed words she found in there and smiled in awe.

Delighted and humbled by the mysterious workings of the universe, Ellie Williams whispered into the predawn darkness.

“Thanks, Mom.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It was back at the Motel 6 when we first learned about the can of crushed pineapples that Ellie had stolen from Frank’s kitchen on her way through his house to the garage. She didn’t tell Joel about it for quite a while. Tonight, she finally learned the secret of the pineapples. When will she tell Joel about what she has found? When will the readers learn what it is? Gosh! So much suspense!
> 
> Also, the ice cream sandwich jacket moment was mentioned too way back in the Motel 6 too, foreshadowed in volume 1, chapter 8. It feels good to finally pay that moment off. It’s been at the top of my legal pad of scribbled notes since last summer. Pretty soon, I’ll be paying off all those tampons she stole from the bathroom at Selby Stadium, back in chapter 13 of the first volume.
> 
> I’m pretty sure that Red Haw Lake doesn’t have cabins like the ones I described here. But I stayed at a lake resort once that did, so I just dropped them into my story out of nostalgia. Write what you know, and all that.
> 
> Lastly, Joel got to second base with Ellie. Good for him. I hope those crazy kids find a way to get naked and snuggly before the end of this story. I’ve got my fingers crossed for them.
> 
> Tune in next week for chapter twenty-three: The Good Life.
> 
> EDIT: I somehow listed "Shelter" as the next chapter instead of the correct one. All fixed now. That's what I get for posting a story right before bedtime.


	23. The Good Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Our heroes spend three days driving across Nebraska.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 23 – The Good Life**

 

          PACIFIC JUNCTION  
                  1/4 MILE  
                 NEXT EXIT

Ellie read the white letters on the faded green sign and the soreness of a long day on the road vanished from her muscles. She leaned close to speak into Joel’s ear, her voice muffled by the motorcycle helmet she wore, but the excitement in her words still evident despite the visor and all the padding.

“The Pacific? We’re going to see the ocean?!”

Joel turned his head only slightly when he replied. This stretch of US 34 wasn’t in the best of shape and he had no desire to roll the big red Honda into one of the wide crevasses of collapsed blacktop that threatened to split the old road nearly in half in some spots. If the bike survived, it would take more horsepower than he and Ellie could muster to get it out.

“Pacific Railroad, kiddo. Not the ocean.”

“Oh,” Ellie said and sat back on her seat, higher than his, a perch for her to watch the world go by as they rolled along the empty byway of a world fallen into silence and desolation long before she joined the dwindling march of humanity. “Of course.”

_People back then didn’t have many names for places. They kept reusing them over and over._

Delaware, but in Ohio. Albany, but in Indiana. San Jose and Havana, but both in Illinois. And how many Lincolns had they ridden through? She shook her head at the silliness of it.

_When I cough out the cure and they crown me Ellie the First, Empress of Saving Mankind, I’m going to fix the map and give these towns some better names._

Joel turned south onto I-29. He pointed at a sign further ahead. She read it.

            MID AMERICA MOTORPLEX  
          MULTI TRACKS – DRAG STRIP  
           GO KARTS – MOTORCYCLES  
             QUALIFIED INSTRUCTORS

        1 MILE AHEAD ON YOUR RIGHT

Joel hollered over his shoulder to her. “I tell you, Ellie, I used to spend a lot of Sundays at places like that.”

“What’s a Motorplex?” she asked.

“You brought your car to ‘em to compete against your friends and stuff. See who was the better driver. Braggin’ rights, you know?”

_You drove your car to a place to drive your car? Isn’t that what the highways were for?_

Ellie smiled and shook her head again. Maybe you just had to grow up in that world for all the pieces of it to make sense.

 

* * *

 

The corners of the map fluttered as she kept it pressed firmly against his backpack. She read the sign drawing closer with each turn of the Honda’s wheels and traced the route with her finger to make sure.

“Turn right,” she said loudly, the wind stealing some of her voice. “This is the one.”

The off-ramp had been too decrepit to use. The other ramps of the cloverleaf were either in a similarly decayed state or choked with rusted, dead cars. This detour had taken them several miles further south than intended. They were averaging maybe twenty miles an hour today, give or take. Even with a short lunch, getting back on the bike as soon as Joel decided they should, it would be a miracle if they managed to push west more than 150 miles today.

“Paddock?” Joel said, easing back on the throttle, glancing at the exit sign. “You sure?”

“I’m the navigator, skipper,” Ellie said, patting his shoulder. “You do your job and let me do mine.”

“Alright,” Joel grumped. “But if we gotta double back after _this_ double back…”

“Beating stick. I understand,” she snarked. “Turn here and take the first right. That’ll be 195th. Keep going north until we get to County Road L35. Then turn left. Trust me.”

“Alright,” he grunted. He was unhappy about this detour. The gas tank was a little over half full but small towns could be scarce out on the big plains. Every drop wasted in a detour was a drop closer to them walking to Wyoming. “Don’t want to go any more out of our way than we have to, that’s all.”

“We won’t,” she assured him. “Next bridge across that river is all the way down by Nebraska City. You said Plattsmouth is our best bet, right? We want to stay away from the Omaha QZ, right?”

“Yeah.“ He said as he tilted the bike slightly, taking them off I-29 and onto the smaller two-lane road. “Big Air Force base used to be there too. Might still be up and runnin’. Too risky.”

He had been grumpy all day. She didn’t know what he thought he had to be so grouchy about. She was the one about to start her period. No cramps yet, no serious ones anyway. She was still so sore from the river adventure that the existing ache in her muscles was probably masking the inevitable tenderness of PMS and the first little flutters of pain to come. But come they would. White-hot, invisible knives stabbing her in the gut. The perpetrator of the crime, the evil lining of her poor uterus, sloughing off and making a break for daylight before the ovary police arrived to find out why there was so much blood everywhere, leaving the rest of her battered reproductive system behind to try and pick up the pieces and move on with her life.

She giggled.

_Okay, maybe it’s not as dramatic as all that. But it sure feels that way for a couple of days._

Ellie folded up the map with sure, quick fingers and tucked it safely into the outside pouch of his fancy army surplus backpack. The usefulness of this map was almost at an end. A few more miles of road and they would cross the Missouri River (which was of course nowhere near Missouri) and leave Iowa behind them for good.

_Fuck, he’s lucky I can concentrate enough to read a map today. All I want to do is eat something warm and sweet and take a nap._

She gripped his shoulder as he banked the bike to ease around the corroded shell of a Nissan Altima and head north on 195th Street. I-29 was to her right now. They would ride north for several miles before they would reach the road they wanted to use in the first place. Maps were unreliable things now. They would need a new one when they crossed into Nebraska. That would be the first order of business: Find a gas station and find a map. She frowned at the thought of riding from a 7-11 to a Circle K to a SuperAmerica to wherever, checking and searching until they found a map of the new state. It was almost routine by now. She had enjoyed it before. New things to see. New questions to pester Joel with. But today was different. Today she was pooped. She had woke up pooped.

_Man, I wish we could’ve spent another day or two at that cabin. It wouldn’t have been very romantic with me PMSing and shit, I guess. But, God, do I miss that big couch and the magic chair._

 

* * *

 

The Plattsmouth Bridge was in terrible shape. Dark red with rust, the girders gone skeletal in a way that gave Ellie the creeps. Several abandoned cars rotted along its length. Running parallel to it, a second, boxier bridge crossed the river a hundred feet to her right. On the other bridge, an endless procession of boxcars, all coupled together, sat unmoving, a train rusting away in the sun. It made Ellie strangely sad to see it.

“Keep your eyes open,” Joel said. “Lots of places for people to hide here.”

“Right,” Ellie answered, shifting higher onto her seat, her shotgun ready.

The water below was faraway and scary dark. Deep. She hated and feared it. The sun would be down soon and the orange rays lit the surface like a thousand tiny fires. It reminded her of the hell the old preacher had spoken of so often during the many, many times she had sat in his office to be reprimanded for some mischief. Only a little girl and already she had most likely condemned herself to an eternity of torment and suffering in hell. The priest was certain of it. Years later and miles away from Boston, his words still reached the darkest parts of her mind. She shivered.

_Fuck you, old man. I’m not going to hell. I’m going to save the world. That’s gotta make up for any bad shit eight-year-old me ever did._

She had much better memories of St. Philomena’s orphanage than the old preacher. Sister Anne and her endless kindness. Sister Abigail and her delicious meals. Even Sister Cecilia and her storybooks with all the important lessons meant to scare some love of the Lord into the girls sitting in a half-circle around her. But not Father Crocetti. There were no good memories of him.

_Fuck that old bastard._

“See that?” Joel asked, indicating with his chin the riverbank ahead and below to their left.

The .45 was in his left hand, resting across the handlebar of the bike. When had he drawn it? She didn’t know. She had been daydreaming and so she frowned, scolding herself.

She looked. A dead man lay down there in the middle of a small gravel road that ran north to south along that river, passing under the bridge and disappearing into the thick forest that the road had been cut through many years before. As they rolled closer to the end of the bridge, she could pick out more details. A rusting gun lay near his hand, a rifle of some sort. He had been dead a week or more, from the looks of it. He was still pretty meaty. Dried blood stained the ash gray rocks of the road he lay on. His clothing was ragged, ripped into shreds. His corpse had been mauled. Before his death? Infected? After his death? Wild animals?

“We’re gonna keep rollin’ for a while,” Joel said. “Put a few miles between us and Plattsmouth and we’ll camp. We can look for a map in the mornin’.”

“Good idea,” she nodded. She wanted to be quit of this place, as Joel liked to say. Plattsmouth could suck it. All she wanted to do was get some sleep.

The sign on the other side of the bridge was big and green.

                   NEBRASKA  
               THE GOOD LIFE

          HOME OF ARBOR DAY

She filed that away and resolved to ask him about it in the morning.

 

* * *

 

“Somethin’ about trees… or recylin’, maybe,” Joel said distractedly, his voice distorted by his gas mask. “Hell if I can remember. There were so damn many little holidays on the calendars back then, nobody could keep track of ‘em all.”

“Really? Cool. We only had three holidays at the school,” Ellie said. She didn’t need her windbreaker today. It was nice and warm in this parking lot. “Well, four if you were an instructor.”

“The bosses got a day off you didn’t? Figures,” Joel said, working a shiv into the lock of the back door of the green BP store.

“Yeah,” she said, watching him work, her shotgun held tightly in her hands. The place had looked deserted from the outside, but a thick fog of spores could be seen through the windows. They had watched a long time, and seen nothing moving in the gloom. But you never knew what might come flailing and screeching through a door that hadn’t been opened in so long. “New Years Day. Hangover Day, some of them called it. I guess they partied a lot the night before. I don’t know. But I remember how grumpy the drill sergeants were. Most of them had the day off, but a few had to come in to keep the cadets in line. Did you ever party on New Year’s Eve?”

“Every damn year,” he chuckled, fibbing just a little for her, omitting his years as a dad, breaking the lock and his knife. “Here we go. Keep your eyes open, kiddo.”

“Always do.”

He swung the door open, the hinges squealing the whole way. A cloud of cordyceps spores drifted out into the sunlight and Ellie squinted and thumbed off her gun’s safety.

 

* * *

 

“It’s so gross when there’s nothing left but shoes,” she said, working another spoonful of beans into her mouth. Beans didn’t keep well in foil. The juice would drip out no matter how tightly you wrapped them up. They each had half a can and there could be no leftovers. “Squicky, right?”

Joel shrugged as though nothing ever bothered him. “I’m just glad none of them were still kickin’. That woulda been a bad place to have a fight. Shit was growin’ everywhere.”

“Did you see that big clump in the corner? The one with all the red finger-things sticking out? There was more of it on the ceiling than there was on the wall or the floor. How the heck does it stay up there when it gets so big? It’s never sticky when I break any of it off.”

“No idea,” he said, finishing his beans. “Nasty shit though. You’re right about that.”

“At least that woman still had some of her body left. A little anyway,” she sighed.

“Cordyceps uses up the whole body eventually. Fertilizer for it, I reckon.”

Ellie sighed again. She still had several spoonfuls of beans in her shiny new aluminum mess kit. Joel studied her discretely.

“Too bad it had grown all over the food on the shelves. Some of those cans woulda been a tasty snack,” he offered, puzzled by her lack of energy and humor today. She had gone to sleep the night before in the pastor’s office of that old church without saying more than a dozen words. This wasn’t like her.

“Yeah. All those bottles of Coke and Mountain Dew and Mr. Pepper. I’ve never seen so much soda in one place before.” The soda had settled into a thick paste at the bottom of the bottles, but still, it had been cool to see so much of it.

“Convenience stores made their money sellin’ chips and drinks and stuff,” he said, opening up more than he usually did. “I can’t even guess how many cups of coffee I bought at places like that. Me and Tommy practically lived at places like that when we were workin’ on a big job.”

“Too bad that fancy coffee machine was covered in fungus,” she said, finally making eye contact with him. Her eyes had been on the bowl in her hands for most of this lunch break. “I would’ve bought you a cup of… um… how did you say it? Cupofchino?”

“Cappuccino,” he smiled, reaching over to pat her knee as they sat in the grass at the edge of the deserted highway. He sighed wistfully, still smiling. “And damn, could I go for a big hot cup of that stuff right now.”

“What did it taste like?” she asked, stirring the cold beans, trying to will them to be appetizing. She didn’t feel much like eating today.

“Coffee?” Joel said, looking down the cracked black stretch of I-80, thinking of all the miles that lay before them. He chuckled and it made Ellie smile. He looked at her affectionately. “Like a big, steamin’ mug of God’s own love, Ellie.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes, momentarily happy and warm. “You’re so goofy sometimes.”

“Go ahead and finish up,” he said with another friendly squeeze of her knee. “We need to get rollin’ again.”

“Okay,” she said, and forced another scoop of beans into her mouth.

“Can’t remember me ever finishin’ a meal before you,” Joel teased. “You’re usually like a little red tornado when you got a spoon in your hand.”

She smiled briefly and decided to go ahead and put it out there. She had put a panty shield in pace before leaving the church this morning, just in case. He was going to see her break out the tampons sooner or later.

“Bowht tuh starh muh pehrurhd,” she said through the savory mess of Heinz baked beans filling her mouth.

Joel spent a few seconds translating her words. A flicker of recognition passed across his face and he looked away, his expression mostly neutral with a slight hint of the almost sheepish about it.

“Oh,” he said.

_Not like it’s my fault. You want the cramps that are coming any day now? You can have them, Mr. Testicles._

“You wanna stop early tonight? Make camp a little sooner than usual?” he asked, not looking at her, his eyes on the road.

“Please,” she said, swallowing the beans. The last scoop left in her bowl had a bit of bacon in it. She had been saving that since Joel had served her lunch.

 

* * *

 

Two games of chess. He’d even let her win one. But nothing seemed to keep her smiling for very long. She’d read another chapter of the legal drama she’d picked up from that old bookmobile and then turned in while there was still a smudge of daylight on the horizon. The stars were out now and Joel sat outside the small pup tent while she slumbered inside, snug and safe in his sleeping bag.

This place had been a beautiful park once, tucked away from I-80, nestled on the picturesque banks of one of the many fingers of the Platte River.

“She would have loved it here,” he mumbled to an empty, uncaring sky. Let the world below fall to ruin and go to seed. The sky would go on, blue then black then blue again, eternal and taking little note of what happened to the world below. The sky endured. Everything else was subject to the seasons and the constant work of erosion.

Joel poked a blackened stick at the campfire, prodding it back to life. Glowing eyes danced in the dimness beyond the light of the fire. Dogs, most likely, he thought. Five or six of them. They stayed too far away for him to count. He kept the shotgun close.

There were eight of them, a pack formed from a now dead trio of dogs that had wandered south from a little town called Ord, setting out one warm summer morning from an old survivor’s camp that no longer had any survivors in it. With no humans to travel with, the dogs were free to set their own course in life now. Eighteen years on now, all three of those original domesticated dogs were dead, and none of these eight had any memory of humans. But their blood remembered. Thousands of years of being mankind’s constant companion couldn’t be erased in two decades. Something about the figure sitting by the fire called to them in a primal way. So they watched, not circling prey, but patrolling, guarding the little campsite for reasons they could give no form to. There was a man. And they could smell a girl. People. Loyalty. Duty. Faithful devotion. Love. They watched and protected, as good dogs should.

In the morning, the people left and the dog’s world was diminished. That night they would howl, singing of the things they had lost.

 

* * *

 

Cornstalks swayed gently in the chilly morning air. Tall and firm but bowing slightly, weighed down with the burden of unpicked ears. Joel had plucked several of them and promised her fresh corn on the cob tonight. She had never had corn in anything but canned (and usually creamed) form. From her place on the hood of the abandoned Cadillac Escalade , the once lustrous black paint gone dull and faded, cracking beneath her shoes, Ellie surveyed the ocean of corn and wondered at a world that had ever needed so much food.

“Is Nebraska one giant cornfield?” she asked.

Joel spat out a mouthful of gasoline and stuffed the siphoning hose into the tank of the Honda. It went much faster when you could just pull the bike next to the car rather than carry the fuel to the Gold Wing one plastic jug at a time.

“Pretty much, yeah.” He spit again for good measure.

“Ever been to Nebraska before?”

“No,” Joel said, watching the precious amber fluid pulse from the end of the house into the thirsty tank. Six and a half gallon capacity and most of it was still empty air in there. The emergency jug stashed in the helmet compartment at the back of the bike was empty too. This had been a close one. Gasoline had been scarce the last few days. “Had a buddy from here though.”

“We gonna pay him a visit?” Ellie asked, her voice playful, her eyes on the endless expanse of corn. The road cut a thin black line through the green going to brown and gold ocean around them. “You two could catch up on stuff and talk about old times.”

The flow from the hose sputtered and stopped. Two and a quarter gallons pulled out of the old Cadillac, maybe? Not bad. But more was needed.

“Matt was from small town I can’t remember the name of. And he’s been dead a long time, kiddo.”

“Original Matt? Or Big Matt?” she asked as he shook out the hose and coiled it up.

“Original,” he replied without further comment.

The girl looked around and kept silent as well. She tried to imagine Original Matt, a man she had never met, growing up here, surrounded on all sides by corn. She felt certain that he had developed a sense of humor to keep from going crazy in a land so flat and corny.

She smiled at her pun.

 

* * *

 

“What about Panda Garden?” she chirped as they rolled to a stop. She had been reading every sign still standing as they drove through the empty town. “Could you go for some Chinese food?”

“I wouldn’t mind a little bit of that,” he said, settling the heavy motorcycle onto its stand. “Climb down… I think some garlic chicken would go down easy right now.”

Ellie groaned and stretched her back. She was sore all over, and grouchy to boot, but she was making every effort to be pleasant company.

“I’ve never had panda meat,” she said with innocent sincerity. “Is it any good?”

“Pandas are extinct, kid,” Joel said, slinging the pump-action Remington over his shoulder. It looked like they would be driving into rain later today. He wanted to check this little town for supplies while the weather was still good.

“Oh yeah?” she asked, falling into step beside him. “Like dinosaurs?”

“Sort of,” he said, his eyes sharp. This town looked deserted. No rusting FEDRA signs in the streets. No homemade fences erected to keep the infected out. No indications that anyone had lived here in years. “Dinosaurs got killed off by a giant asteroid. Pandas died out because people weren’t around anymore to make the dumb critters screw each other.”

“Wh-what?!” she laughed, snorting. “Stop fucking around with me, you butthead. I’m menstrual! Be nice to me, damn it!”

“Dead serious,” he said. “It was always on the news. Some zoo or another spent a bunch of money tryin’ to get a couple of pandas to get it on. And after a couple of years and few million dollars – bang! – a baby panda. And the world rejoiced.”

Ellie giggled and snorted simultaneously, a cute hiccup/coughing sound. She elbowed him adoringly. “I can never tell if you’re fucking with me or not.”

Joel chuckled and let the subject drop. Some things were just too damned outlandish to believe, he thought, even for someone with an imagination as big as hers.

**. . .**

There were three clickers in the gloom, old, with skin loose and leathery, bulging and lumpy with the parasite living beneath. Fuzzy patches grew in oblong tufts here and there on their bodies. Both of the men were naked. The woman wore a tan pantsuit that time had reduced to little more than rags. The trio stood closely together in the corner of the old HyVee supermarket, huddled in the gloom, as far from the daylight oozing in from the filthy windows as they could manage, squawking and clicking softly, communing in the secret tongue of their master. They didn’t detect the two potential hosts skulking about nearby, watching silently from behind the deflated bags of the Doritos display at the end of the aisle. The smaller of the pair had a brick in her hand. The larger one had an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels with a rag tied around the neck and a battered old Zippo lighter in his hand. He needed the three clickers to get a little closer together. He opened the top of the lighter as quietly as he could and worked the little wheel with his thumb. Flint sparked on metal and a tiny flame leaped up, unseen by eyes lost to fungus years before. The larger of the two nodded to the smaller…

 

* * *

 

Five shells and half a magazine for her Beretta. A good price to pay for a few cans of fruit and six cans of chili. ‘Wolf’ it said on the labels. ‘The good stuff,’ Joel had called it. Ellie had never had wolf meat but Joel seemed really excited when he found it, so she was willing to give it a shot.

She didn’t have much of an appetite, which was how it usually went a day or two before her period started, but curiosity was its own sort of hunger.

“Shit. They turned onto 80,” Joel said, keeping his voice low from instinct rather than need. “Guess they didn’t see us over here.”

“Good,” Ellie groused. “We’ve kicked enough ass for one day. Those guys got lucky.”

Joel didn’t see the humor in it. From his spot next to her, hiding close to the Gold Wing in the tall, green growth beneath the old ’98.9 FM – Classic Hits’ billboard sign, his eyes grew hard and he frowned more intensely.

“Now they’re ahead of us on the interstate. That ain’t so lucky for us, girl.”

“So what do we do?” she asked, rising up to her knees, brushing the dried grass and twigs from her belly. She wasn’t worried. Joel would have a plan. He always had a plan.

Joel was already working on that. He shucked his backpack and pulled the map out. He pulled his Taurus revolver to hold one edge of the map down. Ellie pulled her Beretta out and used it to hold the other edge in place.

“Here. See?” Joel said, tapping the map with his finger. “We got lucky with this next detour. US 30 runs pretty close to I-80 in this part of the state. We’ll take this little road back here and scoot up to 30. Then we’ll take it west all the way to North Platte.”

She nodded glumly. “Let’s hope those guys aren’t going to that town.”

Joel grimaced then squeezed her shoulder.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she nodded.

She folded the map up as he heaved and pushed the big bike back onto the road. Ellie didn’t help push and he didn’t ask her to. She wanted to be mad at him about that for some reason. She wanted to be mad at him for any reason right now. She wanted to be mad at herself too. Her head was full of static and she wanted to take a nap.

_I fucking hate having the blahs._

Her eyes scanned the distant intersection where Joel had spotted to pickup trucks, one red, the other silver and green, sunlight glinting from their windows. traveling from somewhere south, along a yellow line on the map labeled ‘183’ in one of the little white shield shapes that Joel had told her meant ‘US Highway.’ Now those two trucks were going west on the orange line marked with the red and blue shield that meant ‘Interstate.’ I-80. Their road, hers and Joel’s. But it looked like it belonged to the dickheads in those two trucks now.

_We were here first, you assholes._

She wondered who they were, the people in the trucks. Bad guys, probably. She hoped they’d get in a wreck and lose their trucks, like she and Joel had lost theirs in Pittsburgh.

She remembered Sam and Henry and tears threatened to surface at the edges of her eyes. She frowned and tried to think of something else. Her emotions were too close to the surface today. Her thoughts seemed to spring up randomly, rushing about in all directions, ignoring her best efforts to control them.

“Herding cats,” she muttered to herself, remembering one of Riley’s phrases. The map had become a foreign thing in her hands. She was suddenly very sick of maps.

The motorcycle’s engine came to life, pulling her out of her reverie.

“Ready to roll?” Joel asked, watching her draw nearer, her stride slower and shorter than usual.

_No._

“Sure,” she said.

 

* * *

 

Grumpy as she was becoming today, even Ellie couldn’t resist a gasp of wonder.

“Are… are those what I think they are?” she asked, her visor up, her pink, heart-shaped sunglasses in her hand.

“Buffalo,” Joel said in a reverent tone. He was as awestruck as she, though he hid it better.

“Buffalo,” she repeated. She remembered the child-friendly illustration of them in her favorite picture book: ‘Animals + You’. Adorable lines and curves, cute little horns over a smiling face set in a head too small for a big, cuddly body held up by four tiny legs that seemed too small to hold up the bulk of the beast. She had always assumed that the cartoonist had exaggerated the ratio of body to legs for maximum cuteness. But there it was in front her. A barrel of a body, a small head, little legs. A living version of that huggable cartoon animal.

“Two hundred head or more of ‘em, easy,” Joel said and killed the motor.

The herd was crossing the highway a quarter mile ahead, ambling along in no hurry, undisputed masters of the American plains once more. Big, brown, horned, powerful. One after another they came, trampling out of the tall grass on one side of the road, tromping across the old blacktop, and bulldozing a new path through the greenery on the other side. The ground rumbled from their passing. With the engine off, Joel and Ellie could feel it vibrating through the frame of the Honda.

“Wow.” Her voice was low, overawed.

“You said it,” Joel replied in hushed tones. “You know, when I was your age, those things were almost extinct.”

“Guess they made a comeback,” she said, resting against him, grinning happily.

They sat there in the westbound lane of US 30, watching the large herd pass to the warmer southern climes. They didn’t say a word. They only sat and watched, silent, until the last of the bison, a mother and a young calf, made the last headlong plunge together into the corridor the herd had carved into the tall grass.

And then the buffalo were gone.

A fading thunder of hooves marked their passage to the south, mingling with the distant rumble of the cloudy, darkening horizon. It would be raining soon. The man and the girl pulled out their ponchos from their packs and slipped them on.

 

* * *

 

The highway ran alongside a railroad track as the small town of Cozad drew near. There were still a few hours of light left but Joel had decided to call it a day. Ellie was grateful.

Rain began to patter on the roof of the old boxcar. Joel pulled the big door shut with a rusty squeal and Ellie brought the water lamp to life.

“Hungry?” he asked, rummaging through the large satchel he had taken from the back of the bike.

Ellie suddenly felt pity for the poor Honda, all alone out in the rain with nothing but a camouflage net for warmth. She was perplexed by this, but not surprised. Her mind insisted on doing its own thing on days like this, taking almost no input from her.

“Not really,” she heard herself say.

“Alright,” Joel said, nonplussed. A can of chili was in his hand; a faint smile was on his face. “More for me.”

Her stomach growled as he was unfolding the wire frame of the small camp stove. She cut her eyes towards him accusingly, but he didn’t smile or laugh. He said nothing. Joel had traveled with women before. Discretion was the better part of valor, as Dr. Montalvo had been fond of saying.

That old man’s been dead for how long now? Joel wondered. Fifteen years? Longer? For a guy so educated, you’d think he’d have been smarter that to try go against Anthony. One in the gut, one in the head. Shot with the same gun Anthony had used to kill Kelly. Montalvo was an old guy. Kelly was a college student. He should’ve known he’d lose her to one of the younger guys sooner or later.

A thought began to form at the back of Joel’s mind. Notions of Ellie’s age… and his own. He pushed it away and sought refuge in an unusual place: his own memories.

I only let that old guy join the group because he had that fancy RV. Kitchen. Toilet. Beds. It was a rolling palace for Montalvo and Kelly. Then Anthony had to go and complicate things by nailing her on our way out of Houston. Hell, I think it was watching those bombers roaring in and blasting the bejesus out of the city that turned him on so much.

Joel worked the can opener around the red-labeled can of chili. His smile grew wider with each turn of the little handle.

Goddamn, Anthony was a weird guy looking back on it. Cold blooded but always trying to hide it. I wondered if he felt anything when he killed Kelly? Poor girl. Broke the lens of her mask and lost an eye. Killing her was a mercy. She was terrified of turning. But Montalvo couldn’t handle that Anthony had been the one to put her down. Stupid old man. Ego got you killed. Even I wasn’t crazy enough to try and outdraw Anthony. How many army guys did he kill that morning outside Boston? Seemed like he got the whole patrol all by himself. I don’t recall Matt or Tommy firing a shot. I don’t think I did either. Jesus, he said he didn’t have any interest in living inside those walls. I never guessed he really meant it. Not like that anyway. The snow was coming down so thick you could barely see. Blowing sideways. Under that old white sheet, he was practically invisible.

Rearguard, he called it. Distraction for us and the smuggler that was going to sneak us in.

Suicide by soldier. That’s what it really was. He had to know the reinforcements would keep coming. None of us had much ammo left.

“That smells good.” A high voice, and a tired one.

Ellie had scooted closer to him.

“Told you,” Joel said with a twinkle in his eye, the morning outside of Boston ten years ago vanished in an instant. “Wolf Brand Chili is the best damn chili in the world.”

He was stirring the meal with a spoon. When had he unfolded his mess kit? When had he lit the compact stove? He couldn’t remember.

Guess she’s not the only one here cruising on autopilot today, he mused.

“Why don’t you go ahead and shuck that corn?” he said.

“Sure,” she said and pulled an ear from the plastic shopping bag. She studied the long, stiff thing, wrapped snugly in stiff, coarse green leaves. Small threads of silk dangled from the tapered end. The other end was a stubby knob. “Umm… how do you open one of these things?”

Joel grinned. “Here. You stir the chili and I’ll show you how to operate an ear of corn.”

She smiled and let him pass the spoon to her.

**. . .**

”What did I tell you?” His voice was smug, cocky. “Best damn chili in the world.”

“Yeah. That was pretty good. You were right. The corn was cool too. I’ve never eaten it all cobbed up like that before. More fun than eating it from a spoon.”

“If we’d gotten to it a few weeks ago, it would have been even sweeter. Nothin’ like corn on the cob. Wish we’d had some butter for it.”

“Butter?” Her voice was quiet, echoing a little inside the pitch black boxcar.

“Yeah. You smear a little on the kernels before you bite ‘em off the cob. Mmmm-mm. Good.”

Someone sipped a little water from their canteen. Rain pounded on the metal roof of the boxcar. Darkness cloaked them.

“Butter was just for instructors,” Ellie yawned, curled up and warm inside the sleeping bag. The cramps had ebbed a bit and she was on the edge of zonking out for the night.

“It was hard to get in the ration lines too.” If the hardness of the boxcar floor was uncomfortable, his voice gave no hint. The army blanket wasn’t enough of a defense against the damp night air closing in. The boxcar was just a little too big for two bodies to warm sufficiently and it wasn’t the sort of place that was safe to make a campfire. He had several layers of clothing on and was warm enough, more or less, though his sleep wouldn’t be particularly restful. Ellie hadn’t offered to share the sleeping bag tonight. That was for the best, he decided. “And you’d be surprised how much it cost on the black market.”

Ellie sighed cutely and snuggled her face into the folded towel serving as her pillow.

A faint laugh rumbled through the big Texan as a thought came to him.

“Hell, Tess used to joke that if we coulda got our hands on a dairy cow, we’d have ruled that city with an iron fist.”

“mmhm” Ellie mumbled and fell asleep. The cramps would have to wait until morning to torment her again.

The rain lulled Joel to sleep soon after.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s always a tricky thing for one sex to write about the troubles of the other sex. PMS must be a serious pain in the ass. But men go bald and can’t pee when they get old. All part of the dance of life, I suppose. ;-)
> 
> Dueling flashbacks in this story. Early on, Ellie recalls some more details of her early years at the Catholic orphanage. While the priest there (finally named in this chapter) didn’t do much for her, the nuns were nice and planted the seed of faith that she struggles to hold onto throughout the run of my story. My take on her conversation with Sam the night before his death is that Ellie is someone who wants to believe in a higher power and some kind of order in the universe, but given what she has been through lately, her faith is on very wobbly legs. Ellie is imaginative, sentimental, and strikes me as the sort who would want to have faith. So I invented St. Philomena’s orphanage as a way of explaining where that belief first entered her head. Your mileage may vary, of course. But that’s my take on it. I don’t see a military prep school as fertile soil for that sort of thing. A society built around desperation and martial law wouldn’t recognize any authority higher than the ranking officer. The flying spaghetti monster is not in FEDRA’s chain of command. ;-)
> 
> Later in the story, Joel remembers a bit of the people who used to look to him for leadership, revealing the fate of Anthony, one of the last four survivors of the group that had left Texas years before. Only Big Matt, Tommy, and Joel made it into the QZ. All the others Joel remembers died along the way.
> 
> American Buffalo are technically called Bison. Bison are temperamental beasts. If you ever find yourself that close to a herd, don’t kill your engine. You might need to get away in a hurry. Also, the image of Ellie and Joel having to stop while a large herd of bison cross the road is one of the first images I had in my head for this series. I’m glad to have finally put that to paper (or pixel, as the case may be).
> 
> See you next Saturday for chapter twenty-four: Riley.
> 
> NOTE: There will be no update on January 30. I will be away on business and won’t be able to post a chapter that weekend.


	24. Riley

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She was the first to die.

**“MILES TO GO”**   
**Chapter 24 – Riley**

 

They drove west while Joel looked for a suitable place to pull off and make camp for the night. The town they had just passed through didn’t look in any ways safe to him. Broken windows, boarded up doors that had been kicked in, bullet holes in storefronts, and no sign of a single living individual. Not even any infected, that he could see.

Joel would have avoided that place altogether if there had been a side road to take. But out here in the boonies, little towns were often built around main roads and the smaller back roads that led off into the surrounding farmlands didn’t appear on any map. Only God and locals knew where those roads went. No detour had been possible and it was only luck that the place had turned out to be a ghost town and he and the girl hadn’t rolled into a world of shit back there.

“Somethin’ about that place just didn’t feel right,” he said over his shoulder to the girl sitting quietly behind him. She had barely spoken since they had left camp that morning. “Don’t you worry, kiddo. We’ll have better luck at the next town.”

The girl said nothing. She nodded in such a small way that it could just as easily have been the vibrations of the road creating an illusion for his benefit. The menstrual cramps that had started in earnest in the middle of the night were sizzling hot knives plunging into her guts remorselessly. She had been quiet and withdrawn since she woke up that morning. Sleeping on the cold, hard floor of the boxcar had done her no favors. Riding on the back of this bike for mile after mile was not an improvement. She remembered the soft sofa and the warm blankets of the lake cabin and sighed miserably.

Joel turned his attention back to the road and said no more.

Ellie stared at the warm hues of a day winding down through the visor of Kristi Chau’s helmet. The late evening sky was the exact same shade of salmon pink that it had been that morning on the roof of the mall in the Boston QZ.

 

* * *

 

“Push, damn it!”

“I am pushing! _You_ push!”

The metal box is big, heavy, almost more than two girls can move with raw muscle power. It squeals and grinds across the pebbled surface of the roof, the hard, rusting edges digging into the neglected surfacing, revealing layers of asphalt, waterproofing plastic, and felt. With a groaning shudder, the mostly empty, mostly scavenged case of the rooftop air conditioner unit slides into place against the only door that allows access to this section of the rooftop of the Liberty Gardens Mall in Boston. There had been a plank up here, connecting one wing of the mall to the main body, but the girls pitched it over the side. They are alone up here now, and nobody will find them. Nobody can find them.

They won’t be able to hurt anyone… after.

“That’s it then.”

“Yeah… Wow… We’re not coming down from here… Like, _ever_.”

“And no one is coming up.”

Riley lets her words hang in the air, leaving other things unspoken. Ellie knows, but she doesn’t say. Better not to say.

“So…” Ellie says, the toe of her shoe exploring the small furrow that the corner of the gutted AC unit plowed into the surface of the roof. “What do we do now?”

Riley walks over to another of the air conditioner cases, this one still mounted to the wide, rectangular base that connects it to the narrow ductwork beneath the roof. It escaped being cannibalized for parts years ago. It sits and rusts in silence now, watching the years go by, waiting to be put to use every summer, ready to cool customers who are never coming back to this mall. She remembers the nice, cool air of the FEDRA building. Only important people have air conditioning in Boston now, but it used to be for everyone. She wants to kick it, but chooses not to. It’s not the rusting old machine’s fault.

“Come here, Boo. Sit down with me. It’s nice and shady here by this… um… I think this is an air conditioner or something. It’s big, I know that. Lots of shade over here.”

“What? Seriously?” Ellie feels like they should do something. There’s still some anger and resentment in her. She still wants to break things. Planning, finding a place to hide, sealing themselves off from the rest of Boston: these things have kept her occupied for the last hour or so. But sitting down? Resting? Waiting? She clenches her fists and looks around. She wants to cry again. She hates crying. She needs to do something.

“Why not?” Riley smiles, trying to be upbeat. She sits down, settling back against the cool metal of the case. “It’s not like we can go back for the water guns or your Walkman. I’m not moving that heavy thing again. So _come here_. Lie down with me. Let’s lay here and look at the clouds go by for a while. You can rest your head on me. I’ll be your pillow.”

Ellie approaches, skeptical but warming to the idea quickly. “What about you?”

Riley slips off her denim shirt, folding it into an oblong shape. She lies back and tucks it under her head as she eases down to stretch out on the pebbled surface of the roof. “I’ve got my shirt to use as a pillow. I’ll be fine. Now get over here. Lie down with me. Let’s talk or something.”

“Okay.”

Ellie lies down next to her friend, laying her head on Riley’s stomach. The older girl’s hands are warm around her shoulders. Elli loves being held. She nuzzles into Riley’s shoulder a little more. She wants to lie with her friend like this forever.

Clouds roll along overhead. Ellie scratches lightly at the makeshift bandage around her forearm. The bite aches. Riley has a small triangle of a bandage around her hand.

“This’ll be a good place to wait. Don’tcha think?” Riley says soothingly.

“Yeah,” Ellie agrees, melancholy but trying to sound cheerful, rather unsuccessfully. “It’ll be just you and me, the way it always should be. Heck, we’re doing Boston a favor.”

Riley agrees. “Yep. Won’t infect anybody up here.”

“I meant that Boston’s two biggest troublemakers just disappeared,” Ellie says, trying to be funny. “Who will spray graffiti all over the walls in the alley behind the school now?”

Riley giggles. “Now we’re the stuff of legend, Boo.”

“Attention, citizens,” says the forever unseen woman of the FEDRA PA system, her familiar voice now being heard throughout the city, “It is now eight A.M. and the workday has begun. All citizens are required to be at their assigned workplaces now and any failure to show without an approved excusal slip is a violation of regulations. Contact your duty shift supervisors or your residential block wardens for more information. Report any signs of infection to the nearest authority. Keep your ID on you at all times when you are outside your residence.”

“I hate that bitch,” Riley sighs.

“You know what this means, right?” Ellie grins, taking a little joy in one final act of disobedience.

“What does it mean?” Riley asks, slender brown fingers idly playing with Ellie’s bangs.

“Roll call is going on right now. I’m a no-show,” Ellie smirks. “It’s my last final demerit. I’m getting kicked out today. Officially.”

“Eh,” Riley giggles and shrugs, stroking Ellie’s freckled check. “You never liked it there anyway.”

 

* * *

 

There were six dead people on the side of the road.

Joel slowed down a little as the bike rolled closer. He wasn’t going to stop. There was no point. These people weren’t a threat and they had nothing he needed.

They lay face down in the grass, a bullet hole in the back of each head. No backpacks, no possessions of any kind, pants pockets turned inside out. Their shoes and boots weren’t too dirty. They hadn’t been walking. They must have had a truck or something. Someone, bandits probably, had pulled these people out of their truck, taken all their stuff, made them line up on the edge of the blacktop, kneeling, and shot them in the back of their heads. A man. A woman. Two boys, young teenagers. A girl, maybe nine or ten. Another little boy, no more than five. All dead, killed two weeks ago or so from the condition of their bodies, once bloated now deflated and mostly liquefied, the soft tissues going fast, maggots and millipedes feasting. Beetles nested in the matted hair of the loose scalps.

Ellie looked away. Joel said nothing. The wheels of the bike never stopped turning. He increased the Honda’s speed and put the unnamed, unmourned family in the rearview mirror.

 

* * *

 

“You know, when you arrived at the school, I thought you were such a brat.”

“I was a brat? Fuck you, I’m _still_ a brat.”

“Yeah. But once I figured out you were a serious troublemaker too, I warmed up to you.”

“It’s why they put us in the same room together.”

“So we could get to know each other… care for each other so much that we’d do something so stupid that the only thing we could do after was to make out on the rooftop of a mall? Was _that_ their plan?” Riley teases.

Ellie tilts her head back as far as she can, looking up at her friend. Ellie knows that Cheshire Cat grin well. But this time it is different somehow. Warmer yet somewhat bittersweet. A sudden pang of sadness washes over her, knowing how little time was left to them. She swallows and tries a joke. It’s how she copes.

“I was gonna say they did it so they could keep an eye on us. Brick up the door to Room 529 and seal us in forever if we ever got out too far of control. But what was it that you said? Right there at the end?“

Riley grins deviously. From Ellie’s upside down perspective, it sits somehow even more cutely on Riley’s face from this angle. “You heard me, Boo.”

“I did… But I’d like to hear it again, thank you,” Ellie says with adorably pursed lips. “If you’ve got plans for today, I want to hear more about them. They sounded _very interesting_. Lots of potential in those plans, I think.”

Riley tucks Ellie’s bangs behind her ears affectionately. “Don’t rush things.”

Ellie squints and juts her chin out a bit. “We’re sort of on the clock here, Riley.”

“I know.” Soothing. Petting. “But we still have time. It’s takes a day or two. That’s what they say, anyway.”

“If you say so. But even if this day hadn’t turned all shitty, I still don’t know that I could wait very long after hearing plans like that. Shit, I can barely sit still now.” Ellie bounces her legs slightly, drumming her heels on the roof to prove her point.

Riley squeezes Ellie’s round shoulders with a strong, gentle hands and buries her own sadness. She sits up at the waist so that Ellie can rest her head in her lap. She pulls the elastic band from Ellie’s hair, letting the long, soft locks tumble free. She strokes her friend’s auburn tresses and begins to sing softly.

“I never knew that girls like you existed… But now that I do…”

“Oh my fucking God! I love this song!” Ellie starts to sit up. Riley gently forces her back down to her lap.

“I know. Now shut up and let me sing it to you.” She clears her throat and continues sweetly.

“But now that I do… I'd really like to get to know you.”

“Oh man! I can’t believe you’re singing to me. No one’s ever sang to me in my life.” The young redhead is squirming with excitement.

“The girl’s too young. She don’t know any better.”

“But I _do_ ,” Ellie whispers devilishly.

“Shut up,” Riley snorts, amused and exasperated. “Or sing along. Or whatever.” She caresses Ellie’s face. “Just let me sing this damn song to you. Okay, Ellie?”

“Okay. Sorry.” She is still grinning wildly. “I’ll behave.”

Riley snickers. “Shit. You’ve never behaved a day in your life, girl.”

“This time is different. I swear.” She lies back, settling in against Riley’s warm, inviting lap. She has never felt so special, so cherished. She smiles and nods. “Please continue.”

Riley sings gently to Ellie, who lies there obligingly, eyes sparkling, smiling, soaking up the sun and the attention and occasionally joining in to provide the vital guitar riffs. There was still time yet. Time to live. But they had to hurry.

 

* * *

 

‘Chappell, Nebraska’ the rust-streaked, red white a blue sign read. ‘An extra P for pride. An extra L for the living the good life.’

The infected were here, hiding in the shadows or lurching blindly into the streets.

Mass produced, orange and black plastic ‘EMERGENCY: Shelter In Place’ signs had been posted around the town. Government lies. Lies people had wanted to believe for as long as they could, believing even when it became clear that the nicely dressed FEMA representatives and their National Guard escort had been the last representatives of the United States government that the people of this town were ever going to see. Arriving in a very official looking convoy, staying just long enough for the nicely-suited people to speak reassuringly to town leaders while armed, uniformed soldiers slapped up the warning signs and handed out leaflets explaining how this outbreak would soon be under control and detailing the precautions to take in the meantime. The military trucks and the important government people in their shiny SUV were soon gone, never to return.

The signs and the pamphlets so generously distributed had offered no protection against the hell that soon followed. Hastily erected barricades provided only a meager amount in the way of salvation. Gunfire had punched holes into those walls of corrugated metal. Robbers, bandits, men driven to desperation as winter came and no government relief arrived. They weren’t bad men before the outbreak, just scared and trying to feed their own families back in their own small, forgotten towns. The FEMA people who had visited Chappell in those early months of the first autumn of the outbreak weren’t bad people either. They were in the Denver MSZ, trying to save those few they could, turning away everyone else who came pounding and wailing at the gates. There wasn’t enough food. There just wasn’t enough food. They wanted to help, especially in those early days. But it had all happened so fast. Too fast. They were doing the best they could. Little empires and kingdoms carved out around supply caches would come later. That first winter, they were all still neighbors, still states united under a common flag and a single government. It would be carved up later, state by state, and then city by city, finally street by street. But for those first few months, people were still trying to help. Yet there was only so much to go around. Chappell had reluctantly been written off with anguish and bitter necessity. There just wasn’t enough food and no safe way to get it to these people. It was decided in Denver that this place was Omaha’s responsibility. If the FEMA reps there ever got that memo, no one acknowledged it. Chappell was just too remote. One more small town too far away from an important city. Shelter in place. Wait for the end.

Joel grimaced and weaved between the rusting hulks of big farm trucks and around barricades lying in the road having fallen down years ago. Clickers were behind them, at least twenty, screeching and grasping. The Honda was too nimble, too fast. It roared through the empty, trash-strewn streets, a red blur that remained infuriatingly beyond their reach. It would soon escape to the safety of the open road, leaving this dead town behind.

There were no people left in Chappell anymore. The last few determined holdouts still hiding in the bunker of the town post office had been lost to the parasite when the final, feeble barricade gave way to the fury of a windstorm in the middle of the night three or four years ago. The infected had gotten inside, racing across the little parking lot and overwhelming the lone, weary sentry before the gaunt, bony people sleeping on beds of mildewed cardboard could mount a successful defense.

“Jesus Christ!” Joel fumed, opening the throttle as they rode past the remains of the last ragged, homemade fence at the edge of town, sending the bike surging down the blacktop, moving a little more quickly than he normally preferred, racing along beneath the fading rays of the setting sun.

Ellie stayed silent. She snugged the shotgun across her chest with a sigh. She didn’t know the story of that town. Each was a tragedy in its own way, but she had ridden through too many of them on her way to save the world. She was tired, physically and emotionally. Whatever had happened back was beyond her power to change. Another wave of cramps tore at her insides and she gripped the small armrests of her seat.

“Fuck” she whispered in the safe confines of her helmet. “C’mon, old man. Find a place to stop, okay?”

Joel didn’t answer. He hadn’t heard her. She had spoken too quietly but she resented his ignoring her all the same.

 

* * *

 

“I look at your face… To tell you that I love you.”

Soft hands on freckled cheeks.

”Don't know what to say… You're everything I got, you beautiful girl,” Riley coos. “The only thing I live for in the whole wide world!”

Ellie adds “Na na na na na na na naaa!!”

A small dark hand squeezes a smaller, fairer one.

“I ain't got nothing to lose!”

Ellie echoes “Nothing to loooose!”

Soft hands caress the side of her neck, trace a small circle around her ear, stroke her cheek. Ellie feels like she is going to melt away in the sun.

”Only living one time!” Riley sings, smiling. “And I want you!”

Ellie feels the sudden urge to cry, but not from sadness. She doesn’t quite understand it and tries to bury the tears before they appear. She smiles bravely. Riley does as well. They keep singing.

“She looks good! It’s true!”

The clouds drift slowly overhead. Below, the sounds of life going on as usual in Boston float up to them.

”The girl is beautiful! She is beautiful!”

Riley trails off, hugs Ellie tightly with one arm as the younger girl sits up to face her older friend. Riley takes Ellie’s free hand with her bandaged one and kisses the inside of Ellie’s wrist. Ellie almost purrs with contentment.

“You are beautiful, Ellie.” Honest words. No teasing now.

“Thanks.” Freckled cheeks now a lovely shade of pink.

Ellie is very nervous. She isn’t sure what to say. She fears saying the wrong thing. She blushes and she hates that she can’t stop her cheeks from reddening. She knows that Riley notices. She both likes and hates that Riley finds it adorable, but that knowledge takes a little of the sting out of it. Never in her life has anything like this happened to her. But the inexperience that makes her delightful to Riley also makes her uncertain. Not knowing what to do next, she tries to carry the conversation forward. She doesn’t yet know how to let the moment breathe. She has an idea where this might lead, but doesn’t know how to get there. She can only try her best and trust Riley to guide her.

“Damn, I love that song,” Ellie says.

“I know.” Riley purrs. “It’s the music of your people.”

Ellie giggles. They sit side-by-side, hip-to-hip. Their fingers slide together.

“That was my favorite CD, Riley.”

“Uh-uh,” Riley corrects gently. “It was _my_ CD, if you'll remember.”

Ellie concedes the point with a small shrug. “Okay, okay. It was my favorite CD _of yours_. Fuck! I loved that damn thing. It rocked. _Hard_.”

Riley chuckles. “I know. You played it until I was sick of it. I guess it _was_ pretty much your CD by that point.”

“Our CD. And what a cool fucking cover. Blood all over his face! Do you think he got punched in the nose or something?”

“Guess so. Rock stars were crazy, they say. Remember those stories Winston told us about the concerts he used to go to?”

“Yeah…” Ellie sighs sadly, remembering a bad time instead of the good one Riley is trying to steer the conversation towards. “Man… I looked _everywhere_ for that thing, you know. I'm pretty sure Bobby Pierce took it.”

“Bobby Pierce? Why do you say that, Boo?”

Ellie holds up a finger, counting off her first point. “Well, for one: He’s a dick. I never liked him. Another upper classman asshole who thought that just because he was on room inspection detail, he could paw through all your stuff. He always spent a little too long checking our underwear drawer for contraband, if you ask me.”

Riley nods and grins. “I agree with that.”

Ellie counts off a second finger. “And two: He’s a _dick_. Again, I offer the underwear drawer as evidence.” A third finger, tapped emphatically by the pointer finger of the other small hand. “And three: he looked the other way while those boys drilled that hole in the girl’s shower. I’m sure of it “

Riley’s eyes roll. It is not her favorite memory. “Yeah. That was embarrassing.”

“Oh!” Ellie exclaims, waggling her pinkie finger excitedly. “And four: He totally stole your CD. _Our_ CD! Fuck him! Guilty as charged! I rest my case!” She slices through the air with the edges of both her hands, a gesture of dismissive finality. Court was adjourned.

“Uhhh,” Riley begins, hedging a bit. “It wasn't Bobby… It was me. I traded it to someone.”

Ellie tries to twist around to look at Riley, disbelieving. “You did? Fuck. I loved that CD.” She looks away, a little contrite. She sighs. “But I guess I did play it too much. I can see why you traded it.”

“I had my reasons,” Riley agrees.

Ellie tugs her fingertips, drawing in on herself a bit. “Shit. Now I feel really bad about beating up Bobby.”

Riley looks down at the girl in her arms. Her voice is high, challenging, skeptical. “ _You_ beat up Bobby Pierce? He's taller than _me_ , Ellie.”

Ellie wiggles a bit, not making eye contact. “Okay. Mayyyyybe I didn't _quite_ manage to beat him up. But I gave him a bloody nose.” She laughs. They both do. “You should’ve seen it Riley. He looked just like that guy on the cover of the CD after I was done with him.”

Riley hugs her proudly. “And you? How did you look, girl?”

“Pfft. Like a badass. He body slammed me onto a lunch table. No biggie. Had trouble walking for the rest of the day,” she shrugs. “But I looked like a _total_ badass.”

Riley cackles and hugs her friend tightly. “You were born to raise hell, Ellie.”

“Fuckin' A, I was,” Ellie nods, beaming with pride, suffused with joy, thrilled to have impressed her friend.

“When did this happen?”

“Three or four days after you left. But I remember it had gone missing a couple of weeks before you took off. And when you didn’t make it back in time for roll call, they came to box up your stuff that evening. I saw Bobby flipping through your pile of music as he was putting into a plastic bag and I just sorta put two and two together.”

Riley shakes her head and smiles. “You should have been a detective, girl.”

“Psssh. Whatever.” She settled in a little closer. “So… what did you trade my second most favorite thing in the world for?”

“Second?” Riley digs through her mental inventory. The plastic flower on the windowsill? The cardboard box of National Geographic issues? Her mother’s switchblade?

“The water guns. Duh. Now go on, what did you trade it for? Candy? Cigarettes? Beer? ... _Rubbers_?” Ellie giggles, her voice becoming an amusing mix of stern rebuke, teenage curiosity, and sexy purr. “Don’t lie to me now, Riley Abel. Was it rubbers? Did you need prophylactics for all the sex you had at the Firefly hideout?”

Riley snorts and rests her chin on the top of Ellie’s head. “Traded the CD to Stevie Cheever. The week before I left.”

Ellie can’t quite process this revelation. “Skeevy Cheever? What the hell for? What did that four-eyed dork have that was worth breaking my music-loving heart for?”

“Porno movie.”

It hangs there in the air between them for a minute. Ellie gapes at first and then slowly grins from ear to ear.

“Good call, Riley,” she says in a hushed, awed voice.

“I thought you’d say that, Boo. Skeevy found an old x-rated DVD somewhere and said he'd leave the door to the media room unlocked after lights out if I’d trade him the album. He really likes that rock star too, I guess.”

“Skeevy is such a suckup,” Ellie grouses. “That's why he gets trusted with special duties and keys and shit. Just like Bobby. Ass kissers, both of them.”

Riley snorts affectionately. “Like you never kissed _my_ ass.”

“Pfft. Maybe,” Ellie shrugs as though it’s no big deal and certainly not something worth keeping score over. “A time or two… Three times… Tops.”

Riley kisses the crown of Ellie’s head and whispers, “Shit, girl. I made you kiss my fine ass all the time. I was the _queen_ of our dorm room.”

Ellie looks out at the morning sky. “That’s different. You took care of me. I didn’t mind kissing your ass. Hell, right now you could pretty much talk me into kissing any part of you, Riley.” Ellie doesn’t make eye contact, but her voice says that she’s grinning. “Go ahead, _my queen_. Try me. I dare you.”

Riley pulls her up, bringing Ellie in a little closer. She leans in to nuzzle her neck. She kisses her there, just below her ear, near the hairline. Her lips linger, her hot breath dances across Ellie’s skin. The bottom falls out of Ellie’s stomach. The butterflies she’d been trying to keep in their cages now fly free inside her.

Ellie groans breathlessly. “Fuuuuuck… Double dog dare me, Riley. Come on! Don’t be a wuss. Do it!”

Riley stops kissing Ellie and instead continues their conversation as though this were no big deal. Ellie is in awe of her command of the situation.

“They trust the older students with responsibilities, Boo. If they’re responsible, I mean. Who knows? If I'd stayed out of trouble, maybe they would have let me have a set of keys.”

Ellie stretches against Riley with a pleasing sigh. “Oh, they would have regretted that.”

She hopes Riley will kiss her neck again. She tilts her head slightly, exposing it to her, hoping she’ll take the bait.

“You know it, Boo. We would have burned that place to the ground.”

“Mmmmmmm. Now there's a happy thought.” Ellie leans over a little more, pressing against her friend, snuggling in. She hopes Riley will notice they are close enough to kiss.

Riley takes her hand from around the girl’s waist and rubs Ellie’s thigh affectionately in slow, teasing strokes. Ellie’s entire body begins to pulse with a wonderful electric tingle. She tries very hard not to press too hard against Riley’s breasts, outlined so nicely beneath her white tank top, even though she wants to feel them pressed against her back so badly. The denim shirt with the little iron-on patch of a dove on the sleeve is still lying on the ground, ready to serve as a pillow again.

“You know, Riley, if you keep doing that, I’ll purr like a kitty for you. I promise.

“Ha! You’re the dog, remember, _I’m_ the cat.”

“Awww. Can’t we both be the cat this time?”

Their laughter echoes across the roof.

Riley sighs, a winsome yet nostalgic sound. “God, that was so long ago. I remember those two girls. They’re both enlisted now. I think they’re on garrison assignment, over in the South End District, last I heard. Probably still sucking cock and double-teaming their superiors to keep their names off the hazardous duty list, weaseling out of all the jobs they don’t like.”

“Teamwork,” Ellie giggles.

Riley laughs softly, her mind on early, better days. “Wow, Ellie. That was, like, the first week after you arrived, I think. We weren’t even roommates yet. I can’t believe you remember those bitches’ weird conversation about their special deal with that creepy instructor. Did you even understand what they were talking about?”

Ellie shrugs. “Not at the time. I was barely thirteen. Went right over my head. But I sort of get it now.”

Riley tucks her cheek against Ellie’s neck, nuzzling her. “Fuck. The things we saw and heard in that place, going on around us… all the time if you knew where to look… FEDRA gave us one hell of an education, huh?

“I feel I got my money’s worth,” Ellie snickers. “I’d recommend it to all my friends.”

Behind her, Riley’s eyes grow hard, the old anger about her stolen childhood simmering in her gut. Memories of her infected father and her dead mother flash through her mind. Images of the terrible night the fat woman was sent to collect her and dump her off at the orphanage, the last night in her old home, the last night of her old life, the first night of her new life. The ten minutes spent under Colonel Turner’s desk, his cock in her mouth, as he filled out the paper work to have Ellie moved into Room 529 instead of expelling the younger girl and putting her out on the streets. Riley had split her lip on the pipes underneath the sink as her crazed father had tried to pull her out to him. It hadn’t been stitched, just slapped with a band-aid. It had left a scar on her face. When Turner had grunted and groaned, pulling her hair while she bumped her head on the underside of the desk drawer while she tried not to gag on the gush of thick semen filling her mouth, that had left a scar too. One nobody but her could see, but it is there every time she looks in the mirror, as clear to her as the thin crease bisecting her upper lip. She frowns. “Man, fuck FEDRA.”

Ellie remains ever the optimist. “Ah, we met each other. How bad could it have been?” She plays with her fingers and forces herself to say the words as casually as she can manage. “And in case, I forgot to say it earlier, I think you’re beautiful too, Riley. Foxy, actually. Alluring… _Enchanting_ ,” she adds with a glimmer of pride in her own vocabulary.

Gentle mocking adorns Riley’s sultry voice. “Foxy, huh? You and your big words.”

“Do I win a prize?”

Riley places her hands on her friend’s waist, turning her in place slightly so they can face each other.

Ellie’s reward is a kiss. Soft. Slow. Wonderful. The young girl wants it to last forever.

 

* * *

 

“Fuck!”

Joel spat out the word then swished a little water around his dry mouth and spat that out too.

A tornado had ripped this place apart, though he couldn’t guess as to how long ago.

In its prime, this place hadn’t been more than a speck along the roadside. A hundred buildings, give or take. A church. A post office. A motel. A gas station that had burned down to a blackened nothing years before the tornado hit.

Joel screwed the lid back onto his water bottle and shoved it into the inside pocket of his leather jacket.

“Don’t worry, Ellie. We’ll find a place to bed down. Won’t be too much longer.”

Joel switched on the bike’s headlights. He hardly ever used it and it always surprised him a little when his thumb slid the little toggle and twin beams of light stabbed out from the front of the bike. Electric light outside the walls of a QZ was a feeble effort to give nature the finger, or so it seemed to the glum teenager on the backseat. The motorcycle engine revved and Joel pulled his boots up from the asphalt to the foot pegs.

“We’ll find a place,” he repeated grimly.

 

* * *

 

Ellie sits between Riley’s legs, lying back against her friend’s soft chest as Riley leans against the AC unit. Ellie loves how the soft swell of Riley’s breasts feel on the side of her face. Riley runs her finger around the neck of Ellie’s tank top, tracing a pleasant pattern on her skin, tantalizing inches away from her small breasts. Riley smiles, feeling the beads of the ball chain necklace beneath her fingers. Ellie is wearing her Firefly pendant. Other than her switchblade, it was the only thing Ellie thought to grab when they ran from the music store downstairs. Somewhere down there, her old Walkman is playing Riley’s mixtape on an endless loop.

They watch birds in the distance, soaring high over the forests beyond the containment wall, slowly reclaiming the abandoned city blocks. They will never see those woods now.

Riley wants to enjoy the moment following the long kiss on the roof. She is content to let Ellie rest her head on her breasts and comb her friend’s red hair with her fingers. But Ellie suddenly sits up, twists around to look at her, bewilderment on her face.

“Wait a damn minute! You had the AV room all to yourself? And you had porn? And you didn't invite me?!? _Riiilllleeeeeey!_ ” She slaps her hands on the denim jeans covering her thighs in pouting anguish.

“Maybe I thought you were too young for that sort of thing, little girl.” Riley leans in, flashing a toothy, mean grin. A girl that ruins a moment like that deserves to be teased.

Ellie is turning all the way around now, scooting in a tight circle on her butt, moving to face her, a face filled with accusations. Riley tries to get her legs out of the way. Her boots are over by her shirt, next to Ellie’s shoes. She doesn’t want their legs to get entwined just yet. She’s trying to pace this thing out for Ellie, who is too young to fully appreciate it.

“Fuck that! Damn you, Riley! I should kick you in the balls for that!”

Riley laughs, probably a little louder than she should. “Oh, please, Ellie. No! Not my poor balls! Did your scrawny ass pay any attention in health class at all? Shit, I thought that would be the only class would hold your attention, you little perv!”

“Don’t change the subject! How could you leave me out in the cold like that?! We’re a _team!_ Is that what the kissing and the singing was all about? Distracting me from your soul-crushing porn betrayal?” Despite her words, she’s not angry. Not really. She’s just young. She hates being left out. She wants to be older. She knows she won’t get the chance now.

“I _wanted_ to bring you in on it, honest. But you were in the box that night. Cheever couldn’t reschedule his night on hall watch. I already had made my plans to sneak out and meet the Fireflies on my next dorm guard shift. There just was any more time. What else could I do?”

“I was in the hole?” A confused moment. A sudden flash of recollection. “Oh yeah! Right! The spray paint!”

They laugh.

Ellie exhales happily, proudly. “Man, I probably woulda got away with it… But I didn’t know that shit would be so hard to wash off my fingers. When I didn’t make it back to class, they came looking for me. Found me in the girl’s bathroom, scrubbing like hell.”

Riley snickers. “Caught literally ‘red handed’.”

They laugh again. It is a wonderful sound.

“Yeah. I was pretty cool that day.” Ellie grins smugly. She is happy to pat herself on the back.

Riley rubs Ellie’s arm admiringly. “You know, Nemeth’s door had to be painted twice. The first coat, you could still see the giant red dick showing through. Man, those were some hairy balls. You don’t skimp on the details, do you?”

“I’m an artist,” Ellie says bluntly, grinning. “Two coats? Really? How do you know that?”

“I was the one they made paint it!”

“ _Really?_ ” Surprised. A secret kept from her all this time.

Riley shrugs. “I thought what you did was funny, so I didn’t tell you. Didn’t want to ruin your moment of glory with any well-deserved guilt. See, they figured I put you up to it, so they made me clean it up. What I get for being your roommate… and being on corrective detail again that day, I guess.”

“Sorry about that. But, c’mon, you were always on corrective detail. They should have put your name on a plaque on the door to that room by now. ‘In Honor Of Riley Abel. Unreformed Problem Child. Class of 2033’.”

Riley grins, white teeth flashing fiercely. “A plaque? Shit yeah! I deserve one.” A deep, melodramatic sigh. “But then, you’d probably just come along and paint a giant dick over it.”

Ellie leans back, arms outstretched in triumph. “Shoot yeah! You know it. A big black one. Whole door. Top to bottom. It’d be even bigger than the one I put on Nemeth’s door. Cum shooting up to the ceiling tiles. Balls the size of boulders. Hairy ones.”

Riley explodes with laughter. “Bigger? _How?_ That damn thing was _huge!_ I had to get a stepladder to reach the head.”

“Mmmm. Yeahhhh. That was one enormous penis,” Ellie says with smug self-satisfaction. “I had to steal the trashcan out of Sergeant Fletcher’s office to stand on. Dumbass never locks his door.”

Riley giggles. “It’s almost like he wants the cadets to steal his smokes.”

Ellie narrows her eyes slyly. “Saayyyy… Speaking of enormous penises… Did you meet any cute guys while you were off training with the Fireflies?”

Riley snorts and rocks Ellie side to side in her arms. “Like I’d tell you.”

Ellie giggles, swaying side to side. “C’mon! I’m never gonna meet any! I’m surrounded by creepy fucks like Bobby and Skeevy! Gimme the details, you CD-trading, art-destroying whore!”

Riley leans in, embracing her tightly, and purrs into Ellie’s ear. “Why do you want to know about stuff like that?”

Ellie pleads her case effusively. “I’ve always been an overly curious child! That’s half of what’s wrong with me! And you’re sixteen! I’m fourteen! You’re my lifeline to stuff like this! C’mon! I gotta know!”

“Mmmm… You _are_ curious, aren’t you, you little pervert?”

“You _know_ I am. The question is…” Ellie is devilish now, looking at Riley through lowered lashes. “What are you gonna do about it, Miss Firefly?”

 

* * *

 

Two miles on the other side of the destroyed town, Joel eased the Gold Wing off the highway, putting the intriguingly named Gold Rush Byway behind them for the night.

Ellie looked around in mild curiosity as they bounced and rolled along the narrow, one-lane road, slicing a path through the night and the tall grasses to her left and the ubiquitous cornfield to her right, only a small slice of the world illuminated by the headlamps of the bike. She glanced behind her for one last look at the highway, but the taillights bathed the world back there in a deep, unsettling red glow and she quickly turned her eyes back to the small road ahead.

Dark shapes stood out against the starry sky to her left. Old barns? Farmhouses? It was hard to say. The shapes were indistinct and the bike never stopped moving.

“What about those?” she asked, the first words she had said since breakfast.

“Not safe to check out a house in the dark,” he answered. “I didn’t see any lights over there when we made the turn, but there might be infected. Or booby traps. We’ll find a spot in those woods up there, maybe.”

She said nothing. She didn’t want to sleep on the hard ground. But she didn’t want to set off a homemade bomb by walking through a tripwire in a house too dark to see anything either. The dark outline of the treetops against the horizon ahead of them didn’t look too appealing.

“Almost there, kid. We’ll be makin’ camp soon.”

His words gave no comfort tonight. She was cold and tired and sad.

 

* * *

 

It is mid-morning now. Up in the sky, a there is a cloud that looks like a bunny. Or so Ellie claims. To Riley, it looks more like cat with antlers.

They lay next to each other in the shrinking shadow on the far side of the AC unit. Ellie stares up at the sky, her head on Riley’s belly. Riley is idly playing with her bangs. It makes Ellie feel warm inside. Not as nice as all the kissing they have just done, but it is a nice, warm feeling all the same. Ellie wishes there had been a little more than kissing, but Riley is the one guiding this affair.

Ellie guesses that her room is probably being searched, but she doubts anyone will come looking for her. Why would they? The instructors are probably glad to be rid of her at last. FEDRA is finally rid of both of them.

The bite on her arm aches a bit, but it is manageable. Itchy and throbbing, more than anything, really. Neither one of them feels any different. Not yet anyway. Ellie is giving some serious thought to praying for more time together before they turn, but Riley speaks up and she lets the thought go. This is more important. This is real. Prayer can wait. It usually does with Ellie.

“So… Do you wanna hear anything else about it, Boo?”

“About what? That dumb Firefly guy you flirted with when he was _supposed_ to be training you in hand-to-hand combat? What for? You said nothing happened. Sounds like it should have, if you ask me. I’m disappointed in you, by the way.” Her voice makes that clear. She tries to make it sound like she is teasing, but the truth is Ellie doesn’t like the thought of Riley kissing anyone but her. “And jealous,” she adds with a glum murmur.

And horny, she almost says but luckily she catches the words in time. There had been talk about more making out and Ellie is eager to get back to it, but Riley is taking her time with this for her own reasons. Ellie is only able to wait this patiently because she trusts Riley so completely. This older girl is the only person in the world Ellie has ever been able to trust. But even the most powerful bonds of loyalty are of little comfort against unrelenting teenage horniness and jealously.

“No, dumbass. Do you want to know about the porno I paid so much for?”

“Oh! Hey! Yeah!” Ellie sits up, suddenly excited. The pain in her arm fades from her mind. She twists around, pulling her knees up to her chest and scoots around on her butt to face her friend “So,” she begins, resting her chin in her hands. “What’s porn like?”

“First,” Riley says with mock solemnity, “you need to know that I made that trade for both of us. The plan was that you were going to watch it with me. I know how much you wanted to see one. Hell, I was kind of indifferent to those things. But you were just fucking obsessed with seeing one!”

“Because _everyone else_ on the floor has seen one. I’m the _only one_ who hasn’t!”

Riley takes Ellie’s hand and squeezes it, smiling and a bit remorseful. “I know. That’s why I was trying to make it my secret ‘going away’ present to you before I snuck out to find the Fireflies. It’s the _only_ reason I would have ever given Cheever the CD you loved so much. I bargained hard, but that four-eyed cockwipe wouldn’t accept anything else.”

“You were gonna to break curfew and take me to a porno? Riley!” Ellie wipes away a fake tear with a dramatic sniffle. “You’re so good to me. I could cry right now.”

Riley laughs and smacks Ellie’s thigh. “Shut up, bitch.”

Ellie is only half joking but she laughs along with her friend, trying to play it cool. Riley is always cool. Ellie wants to be cool too.

Ellie takes Riley’s hand in both of hers. “The important thing is that one of us got to watch it, I guess.”

“You think I wasn’t gonna watch it? I know you’re not _that_ dumb. I paid Skeevy a fortune for a ticket to that show!”

“You paid for two tickets, Firefly girl.”

“Fuck yes, I did. That’s why I watched it… _twice_.” A raised eyebrow. A pompous sneer.

Ellie pumps her fist. “Boosh!”

Riley giggles. “More like sploosh!”

“Heheh.” A beat. “Really?” A smaller voice, sharing a secret now. Curious.

“Let’s just say that in pornos, there’s a lot of fluid flying around.”

Ellie grins, trying to picture it. Her mind can only conjure a strange mélange of clinical medical diagrams and crude drawings seen scrawled on the bathroom stalls. “Oh yeah?”

“Yep. The way they do things in those movies, nobody’s gonna get pregnant. It goes everywhere except where you think it should.”

“Huh? …OH!”

Riley laughs. Ellie is embarrassed.

“Don’t laugh at me like you’re some kind of expert! So you’ve seen a few dirty movies. That doesn’t make you the sex queen of Boston.” Ellie’s face reddens and she wants to be cool, damn it.

“Damn right, I’ve watched a dirty movie… twice.” Riley leers, holds up two fingers, pushing them at Ellie’s face imperiously. “Which is twice more than you, girl.”

“Fuck! Stop hanging it over my head and tell me about it already!” Ellie’s hands make flustered gestures in the air. She has never been blessed with patience. What little she has is running out fast.

In her complaining, Ellie missed Riley’s secret confession. Riley is happy to let it slide. She has a reputation to protect.

“Okay. Alright. Calm down before you piss yourself,” Riley laughs, giving her friend’s hand a playful shake in her lap. “I’ll tell you, you little pervert. But just know up front that I’m saving the best scene for last. You’re gonna like it. I found it to be very… _educational_.”

“Fuck this stupid waiting! Just get to the good stuff! Was it like five or six people in a pile? Can that number even work? It could, right? Maybe? What was it, damn it?!”

“You really can’t wait?” Riley does her best to sound parental, indulgent, and patient.

Her face boggles. She grabs Riley’s wrists. “Does it look like I can wait? Are you trying to find out if someone can die from _expectation_? Because I’ll tell you right now that I’m about to prove it to you! Just tell me! How many people were in this pile? A dozen? Was there an elephant? A zebra? A magician? _How many people, Riley?!_ ”

“Just two.”

“What?! No! Ripoff!” Ellie shakes her head in energetic disappointment.

Riley leans close. She whispers.

“Two _girls_.”

“!!!! … _Ohhhhh_ …” Ellie becomes very quiet. She is finally still; ready to hang on Riley’s every word.

“Like I said, Boo. It was very educational.”

“I’m sorry I ever doubted you, my dearest friend,” Ellie says with a gravely serious nod. “I hope you took notes.”

“I did.” Riley taps her head. “It’s all up here, Boo.”

 

* * *

 

“Gotta be quick, yeah?” Joel said, unpacking their gear by the light of the Honda’s lamps. “Don’t want to drain our new battery.”

Ellie nodded, snapping together the aluminum poles for the pup tent. The thick plastic stakes were lying next to the unfolded tent, spread out on the grass in the little clearing at the center of a small cluster of trees that marked the boundaries between two old crop fields.

“Get the tent up and then we can scrounge up some wood and get a campfire started. I’ll show you how to use that dryer lint we found to get one started in a hurry. Bet you’ve been wonderin’ how that worked, right?”

Ellie nodded again and began to pound the first peg into the soft earth with the bottom of a can of mixed vegetables that would be on the menu tonight. It didn’t matter if it got dented now, just so long as one end could still be opened.

 

* * *

 

Riley’s detailed recollection of the dirty movie is slowly percolating in Ellie’s head. Who knew Riley was such a good storyteller? Ellie finds that she is equally intrigued and repulsed by the details Riley has shared. But…

Ellie grins.

Riley really had saved the best part for last.

Two girls.

Ellie grins again. Actually, she never stopped grinning.

They stand facing each other on the edge of the roof, looking down upon a mid-day Boston. They no longer care if they are seen by patrols, not that such a thing is likely. No one is ever up here. Who would look? The heat is starting to build. Riley’s beloved denim shirt lies over by the AC case, on top of an old tarp they had gathered to serve as a bedroll or tent. They hold hands. Ellie tilts her head up to receive a kiss from Riley, who has always been taller of the pair. The pebbled surface of the roof is knobbly beneath their sock feet. Neither one of them cares.

They kiss. Ellie remains almost innocent in the way she does it. Inexperienced, but not for much longer. She is learning quickly.

Riley looks down at Ellie’s feet while she speaks, not wanting to make eye contact. “I’m sorry about the things I said the night I left. I was just trying to make it easier on you.”

Another kiss. Apologetic. She wants Ellie to forgive her.

Didn’t work. Ellie cranes her neck, stands on her toes to kiss Riley. She wants to be the one to give the kiss this time.

Another kiss. Defiant. Punky. Resilient.

“I know,” Ellie says.

“I was trying to protect you, in case they asked you any questions about me. But I still feel bad about it.”

Another kiss. Contrite.

One of Riley’s hands slips free from the other girl’s grasp. She eases it around Ellie’s waist. Ellie lets herself be drawn closer, settles in against Riley, feels the soft firmness of Riley’s chest against her own. She wishes she weren’t so flat-chested. It doesn’t matter. She is in love.

Ellie speaks into Riley’s neck. “Then make it up to me, already. C’mon! Let’s get to this! I’m about to pop!”

A teasing, lingering kiss.

“You never were any good at waiting, Boo.”

Ellie breaks free of the embrace. She takes a step back to get a little distance for what she’s about to say. She tries to make sure the words don’t come out too angrily. She has always had more temper than patience. But she is _trying_.

“I’ve been waiting _all morning!_ Fuck, I’ve been waiting for this for _years!_ ”

Riley crosses her arms, cocks her head. Skeptical. Teasing. “Years, huh?”

The words come out all at once. Ellie stomps around in a small circle, gesturing with her hands.

“Well, you always knew I liked you. And you liked me… In a kid sister sort of way, I though. I mean, you took me under your wing right from the start. Once you gave me back the Walkman you swiped from me, I guess. And after that, we became best friends. And, well… in the last few months…”

The deluge of words trickle to a stop. She digs at the pockmarked surface of the roof with her toes, dirtying the cotton of her sock.

“I sorta began to realize how _much_ I like you, Riley. _Like_ like you, you know? As more than just a friend. And then we had that great night… when we did all that stuff… in bed…”

Riley blushes, smiling a little, looking at the edge of the roof. She remembers that night. She and Ellie had fooled around in their dorm room. Ellie has sucked her tits while she played with her pussy. She had cum so hard she squirted all over Ellie’s mattress. _Squirted_. That’s what Cherry had called it when Riley discretely sought out the most experienced girl in school, looking for answers. She had told Cherry that it was a boy who had been with her… that it had been a boy who made her pussy spray like that. She had lied to Cherry. The truth was too weird to think about. Too weird to admit to herself. Maybe if she’d been more accepting about what had happened with Ellie… maybe she wouldn’t have run away like a fraidey cat… maybe she wouldn’t have come slinking back weeks later… maybe she wouldn’t have dragged Ellie to this mall to salve her own guilty conscience… and her horniness… a horniness the Firefly instructor hadn’t been able to stoke into a bonfire half as well as Ellie had.

Maybe she should have just been honest with herself about it.

Maybe she should have just admitted that she was in love with Ellie… horny for Ellie…

Maybe she should have just accepted that maybe she wasn’t as straight as she’d always thought she was.

Maybe…

Maybe if she had, they wouldn’t have been bitten.

Ellie keeps speaking. Riley doesn’t have time to get lost in these darker thoughts. She trains her ears on Ellie’s words and tries to shut out her own thoughts.

“And then you were gone without a word. Well, you were gone with a bunch of mean words I’m pretending you never said. And then you came back out of the fucking blue. And now I suddenly find out that you… like me… too.” Ellie grinned, and pulled on her fingers again. “It’s pretty fucking awesome actually.”

Ellie realizes she is babbling and forces herself to trail off into silence. Has she said too much? How dumb must she look to Riley? Is she always going to be the little kid sister?  
She wants to bridge this gap and join Riley on the cool side, but she isn’t sure how. She bites her lower lip and looks down at Riley’s socks.

Riley steps to her, slips both arms around Ellie’s small shoulders. Ellie is dying to place her hands on Riley’s breasts. She is trying to go slow, but it’s so hard. She settles for placing them on her friend’s hips instead.

“It is.” Riley’s voice is soft, loving.

“What?” Ellie squeaks. Distracted by Riley’s form and her own uncertainty, she has lost the thread of their conversation.

“Awesome.”

Ellie tucks her chin low, overwhelmed, crazy in love. “You said it, Miss Riley.”

They kiss.

A deeper kiss for deeper truths. It seems to go on for an hour. Ellie’s knees almost fold up. They come up for air. Ellie tries to find her voice. Tries to sound casual. Like she’s done this before. Tries her best to sound like Riley.

“Quick question.”

Riley nuzzles her cheek against Ellie’s, making the young girl purr. “What is it, girl?”

Ellie gives her a quick peck. Playful. A promise of more to come later.

“You had me all to yourself in that dorm room _every_ … _damn_ … _night_. I was right there for the taking! _Ready to be taken!_ Why the hell didn’t you make a move, Sex Queen?”

Riley feigns disappointment with her girlfriend. “What? And do it on a crappy bunk bed? Ick.”

Ellie giggles, pushed on. “I was a young, naïve girl dying to be corrupted! I would have done it on the scummy floor of the girl’s shower! Fuck, I would have let you have your way with me on the sticky floor of the girl’s latrine, if that’s what it took. Not even joking!”

Riley gives her a small, quick kiss. Her voice is sultry, captivating. Seductive. “You deserve a better place for your first time than our shitty dorm room, Ellie.” She indicates a large, folded-over tarp lying nearby. “Over there, for example. Much classier. And what about this view? Better than the cracked ceiling of our room. It’s like we have the whole world all to ourselves.”

Riley wants to lean in again for a kiss, but Ellie breaks free, full of energy. Bursting with it. She bounces in place, her hands patting the sides of her thighs.

“I can’t wait any more, Riley. Come on. Show me how to do this. What do I do? Do we get undressed now?”

Riley places her hands on her hip, cocks her head, sassy. “Slow down, girl. We’re going to take things _slow_. And forget what I just said. All we’re going to do is make out, okay? I’ll teach you how to do that. You can move up to that level.”

Ellie stops bouncing. Disappointment and shock fall from her open mouth.

“But… I mean… What the hell were we doing before? And what’s the difference between that and this mysterious ‘making out’ you speak of?”

Riley’s dark eyes glimmer playfully in the light of the warm sun. “The difference is subtle… but important.”

An exasperated, petulant sigh. “Thanks, Professor Able. You know subtlety has never been my strong point. So just tell me already. Are we going to have sex or what? I can’t take it anymore.”

“Sex?” The older girl blinks, deadpan, as though this thought had never even occurred to her until this moment.

“Yes! Sex! You know... lady sex. Girl on girl. Carpet munching. Muff diving! Clam… uh… something or other. Whatever the fuck we’re calling it, alright? Fuck!” Ellie suddenly turns away, her eyes downcast. “Shit! Why didn’t I wear better underwear today? The black ones? Or the red ones? But fuck no, stupid Ellie had to wear the white ones with the stripes. Might as well be the goofy ones I had with the ponies and rainbows on them when I was ten,” she mutters.

Riley speaks gently, needling her with love. “It’s so cute when you talk about yourself in the third person.”

“The instructors never thought so.” Ellie looks back, yearning to connect. ‘Don’t tease me’, her eyes say, though she says nothing.

“They never saw you the way I see you, Ellie.”

“Well, you’re about to see all of me.” She cuts her eyes away. “Don’t laugh when you see my underwear, okay? I don’t want to have to kick your butt.”

Riley snarks, “Ellie. Slow down. We both know I would whoop your narrow ass up and down this roof. And I’ve seen you in those undies before, remember? They’re cute.”

She blushes and Riley almost gives in to the urge to tease her, just a tiny bit.

This is different, but Ellie can’t say that. She suddenly has an inexplicable, urgent need to sound like anything other than the clueless virgin they both know she is. She just wants to be cool. Like Riley.

Ellie giggles. “I guess you’ve seen just about everything… I guess. We have taken a lot of showers together.”

“Yeah. Very romantic. You, me, and the twenty other girls on our floor.” She winks playfully. “But I only had eyes for you, you sexy thing.”

The younger girl smiles, blushes, plays with her own fingers, shifts her weight from foot to foot. “So… umm… Should I undress you first? That’s more romantic, right? Or do you want to undress me first? Totally cool with that part, by the way. Or…do we just get undressed together, like we’re getting in the showers or something…Or… what?” She lets her hands hang at her side, blushing, smiling, eyes lowered but still looking at Riley, taking her cue from older friend, like always.

“We’re just going to make out, Ellie. You’re a little too young for anything else.”

A flash of angry green eyes. Fists balled at her sides. Her hair whips in the wind as she spins to face away from Riley.

”What? Don’t give me that shit, Riley! I’m old enough! You know I am! Hell, how old were you the first time? Don’t start pulling this upper classman shit on me now! Not you!” Suddenly soft, plaintive. She can’t face her older friend. “Not you, Riley. _Please_ …”

“Trust me. You’re not ready for that, Ellie,” Riley says, knowing that even if Ellie is, she may not be. She hides her nervousness well. Ellie doesn’t suspect.

Ellie looks back, her determined face giving it all away. She is going to dig in her heels on this one. Riley knows the look well. Already the wheels are turning in her younger friend’s mind. Riley knows she has to get back to where they were before and quickly, or else lose the moment. Maybe for good. She has a plan and she knows it’s a good one, if she can just find a way to placate Ellie. Not always an easy thing to do.

“ _But_ ,“ she purrs, dragging out the syllable, “you _are_ ready for what we’re going to do next. And you’ll like it. I promise.”

Being younger and seeing her older friend with devoted, worshipful eyes, Ellie has no way to know that Riley isn’t really all that much more experienced than her. A handful makeout sessions with a few boys here and there, sure. A boy that she eagerly gave herself to for a few weeks until he graduated the school and left her behind without another word. Promises from a Firefly sergeant that never came to pass because Marlene got wind of it before she could sneak into his room. But when it comes to being with another girl, Riley has nothing more to go on than a few nights of nervous canoodling with Ellie and the mental notes she had made during girl-on-girl scene of the movie. But she is ready to take the plunge and leave it to chance, hoping that Ellie never realizes how big she is bluffing with just a pair of threes. Ellie usually beats her in poker, but today Riley is certain she finally has the edge on her. She can see Ellie’s resolve begin to falter.

Ellie stammers, “But… I… It’s just… I mean…”

Time is running out and Ellie knows it. She has her entire life to live in an afternoon. She wants to experience it all. It isn’t fair. It’s not her fault the scaffolding broke. It’s not her fault she got bit. It’s not her fault she’s only fourteen. It’s not her fault that Riley is all she has in the world… All she’s ever had. She tries to focus on the last part. She takes a deep, nervous breath and struggles to come to terms with all of it. She’ll follow Riley’s lead. It’s what she always does.

“Look... I want more,” Ellie says. “But I’m cool with what I’m going to get. You set the rules. You always have. Fuck, you’re the only person who could ever tell me what to do. I trust you, Riley… I’ll do whatever you want. Just show me what to do… And, umm… I…”

A deep breath. Here it comes. Time to lay it all out on the table. The words come out in a rushing torrent of enthusiasm.

“I… I love you, Riley. I’ve loved you since the day I got off the bus here. Since you knocked the fuck out of those guys who were giving me shit. That was so cool. _You_ were cool... so fucking _cool_ … I fell in love with you on that day, and I’ve loved you more every day since then.”

“You’ll do whatever I want, huh? Mmm. I like the sound of that,” Riley teases, trying to keep the mood going. Ellie could be a little pouter if left to her own devices. “You promise you’ll do _anything_ I ask. No matter what?”

Ellie nods excitedly, biting her lower lip. Her eyes glisten and Riley can see herself reflected in them. Her heart feels like it’s going to beat out of her chest. Ellie feels a wonderful warmth spreading out from her center like a rippling tide. She wants to drift away on that wave. She wants to share this incredible feeling with Riley. She wants to feel it herself, even more deeply than she is feeling it now. She knows she is ready, even if Riley doesn’t. But more than anything, she yearns for something even more important.

She’s said the words. Finally, after all this time, she’s said the words she kept hidden inside for so long. Now she aches to hear them said back to her.

“Y-you know it.” She hears the catch in her voice and hates it. She cannot know how appealing it is to Riley.

“Well, what I _want_ to do first is lay you down over there on that incredibly romantic tarp … and then I’m going to kiss you, Ellie Williams… A lot. And in lots of places. And then… I guess we’ll see where it goes from there,” Riley winks, taking Ellie by the hand.

Any fear the girls had felt about the terrible thing to come is gone in this moment. The merciful reprieve won’t last, but for this short span of time, they are free of it. It is liberating in a way they have never known before. It is almost more than Ellie can understand. She tries to grope through the tangle of emotions she is feeling.

Say the words to me, she thinks. But she is too scared to ask. They have reached their destination. They stand at the edge of the old tarp.

“God, I hate mysteries!” Ellie grumps, frustrated and turned on and wanting to dance with Riley here on the rooftop. “Am I getting undressed at any point? Is my bra coming off at least?”

The older girl whispers into her ear. “Shit. You barely need to wear one, girl.”

“I’m serious, Riley!” She was. “Don’t tease.”

Say the words, she says with her eyes. I said them to you. Don’t leave me hanging here.

A playful shrug of the shoulders, an incline of the head, a tilt of a hip, a good attempt at bedroom eyes. Riley has never been as cool as she is right now.

“Don’t go trying to guess my plans, girl.” She reaches out to take Ellie’s trembling hands.

Tears shine at the edges of Ellie’s eyes, barely held back. It’s too much. She hates waiting. She hates not knowing.

“And, for the record…” Riley coos, “I love you too, Ellie. Don’t pretend you didn’t know that.”

“Thank you, God.” The barest whisper. She almost collapses from the surge of relief. Then a sudden dramatic blush. “Shit, did I just say that out loud?”

“You’re so cute when you get all shy like that, Boo.”

“Shut up.” She wants to look away bashfully, but Riley holds her chin in her hand.

“This is it, Ellie. You ready?”

Her answer is breathless, quavering, anxious. With any luck, no matter what Riley has planned for them, she is hopeful that they will get carried away in the moment, and blow a giant hole in those precious plans. Seriously, screw those plans. Life is short. Plans are for suckers. A girl could dream. And for a girl in love, anything is possible.

“I’m ready, Riley.”

 

* * *

 

She sat closer to him than usual while they ate in the warming glow of the campfire. He thought about scooting away as casually as he could manage, but it was clear that she was hurting deeply about something. There was an unseen weight on this little girl’s shoulders, and he realized that he was only seeing the full extent of it for the first time. She seemed too damned small for such a terrible burden. He let the thoughts roll around in his head for awhile.

Immune? How the hell do you deal with such a thing? And she’s left behind all her friends in Boston. She’ll probably never see the place again. No family to go back to. But that city and the people she knew there was all she had in the world. And now they’re gone for good.

She’s out here, farther from home that she’d ever dreamed she’d be, and she’s all alone with nobody but me to look after her, a sick old fuck that can’t keep his hands to himself. Jesus, that’s some bad luck.

He’d held it back as much as he could since they’d left the lake cabin, but in that moment of realization, his heart went out to her of its own accord.

Poor little thing. God love her. She’s trying hard to bear the load, that’s plain to see. But it’s gonna be too much for her in the long run.

Tommy. Maybe he can help her. He had always been good with Sarah. Hell, he had been great with all their friend’s kids. Every cookout they went to, kids just loved him. If you were old enough to throw a football or run around the backyard like an idiot, you had a friend in Tommy.

I’m no good for this sort of thing. I’ve been too busted up inside for too damn long. I can’t help her. But Tommy is all heart. Too soft for some kinds of work, maybe, but he’ll be able to find a way to connect with this kid in a better way than I have. He’ll find the right words or something, and he’ll do it without groping her damn tits.

He’ll find some way to help her. I know he will.

Hang on, kid, he thought. I’ll get you to Tommy. He’ll know what to do. Just hang in there.

He tried to think of an amusing story to tell her about his baby brother, to keep her interested in meeting him. Maybe it would help to take her mind off things.

“Life’s not fair,” she mumbled, interrupting his thoughts. Her voice was so soft that the night wind almost carried it away. She never took her eyes off the campfire.

Teenage girls said that sort of thing all time. Had since the beginning of time, he reckoned. But it was clear from the way the words fell from her mouth, that this girl had the full and awful understanding of the absolute truth of those words.

Poor kid, he thought.

“Is it, Joel?”

He looked up at the twinkling stars of the night sky and a deep, weary breath escaped him.

“No, kid. It’s not.”

She sniffled once. Just once. She scooted over just an inch or two and leaned her head against his shoulder. Her little hands lay limp in her lap, the food in her bowl only half eaten.

He mulled things over for a moment and finally thought, Fuck it.

With his eyes still on the distant night sky, he slipped a comforting arm over her shoulder. She leaned into him even closer. He could tell she was trying her damnedest not to tune up and cry. He felt for sure that if he made eye contact, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. She kept her eyes on the fire while he kept his on the night sky. He missed the chance to see her smile, just a little bit.

They sat there together for a while, saying nothing. Before too long, Joel realized that Ellie had fallen asleep. He decided he would let her rest a while longer before he carried her to the tent and the sleeping bag.

Let her sit here till the fire died down some. Wouldn’t hurt nothing, he supposed. What’s done, is done.

He would try harder tomorrow to keep her at arm’s length. But not tonight. He survived by following certain rules. But if anyone understood that rules were meant to bent sometimes, it was this little girl.

Yeah, I suppose it couldn’t do all that much harm to let her rest her head on me a spell tonight, he thought. Whatever’s on her heart, it’s heavy. I reckon I can shoulder part of the load for her for a bit. At least until I can get her to Tommy.

Hang in there, little girl. I’ll get you to someone who can help. Someone who won’t take advantage of you like I’ve done. I promise.

Now that she was safely asleep, he looked down at her face. On her cheeks there were a few tears drying slowly in the cool breeze, but the sadness that had hung there since they parked the bike and made camp was finally gone from her features, and he was glad for that. With his free hand, he brushed her errant bangs away from her face and tucked them behind her ear.

Cute kid. Sweet, in her own way. Always upbeat. She certainly deserved a better hand than the one she had been dealt. But she wasn’t the only girl that he could say the same thing about.

Maybe she won’t have bad dreams tonight. Maybe I won’t either. But who can say for sure? The world wasn’t fair. Not to old, murderous bastards like me. Not to adorable, oddball kids like her. And not to loving, faithful daughters who woke up in the middle of the night to find the world ending all around them. Life wasn’t fair to anyone.

“Wish it was,” he said to the waning slice of moon hanging in the black sky, and hugged her tight. He tried not to look at his watch.

With both his arms around her now, the dozing girl sighed softly and nestled into him in a way that would have melted the heart of a less bitter man. Later, lost to a dream, she would whisper a single word. But Joel had fallen asleep by that time, sitting up, his arms still around her protectively, his cheek resting on the crown of her head. He didn’t hear the name escape her lips.

“Riley.”

 

* * *

 

Nighttime in Boston. A light drizzle is falling.

They had drifted off to sleep, wrapped in an old tarpaulin, clinging to each other for comfort and strength in the evening shade of the big AC case. Riley had said she had a headache. They had been too afraid to say what they were both thinking. Ellie had wished she had her backpack with her. The joke book would have been just the thing. A loving embrace would have to do instead.

Their last words before sleep had been of their shared love. There had been a sweet desperation to their tender oaths. They were afraid to fall asleep. Afraid of what might happen during the night. They had been bitten early that morning. How much longer now?

Ellie awakens with a yawn. Riley is no longer entwined with her. They had been tangled together when they fell asleep, using Riley’s beloved vest as a pillow, sandwiched between the layers of the folded tarpaulin they shared as a bed. She smiles. Speaks softly. An intimate whisper meant only for her best friend’s ears.

“Holy fuck, Riley. That was… _exquisite_.”

It was a word Ellie had only thought she knew the meaning of before today. Riley had showed her what the word really meant. After, she had taught her what spooning was too. She never knew it was possible to feel that safe while you slept. Never before in her life. Or ever again, she supposes. It’s not fair. But it’s enough.

We fight for every second we have together. We hang on to those we love for as long as we can, Riley had whispered into her ear.

_I’m hanging on with both hands._

She realizes that it a light rain is falling on them. Her head is damp. She doesn’t care. She is still very warm inside. For someone who hated the instructors in the school, Riley surprised them both by proving herself to be a dedicated teacher. Ellie smiles at the realization, not altogether sure if it counts as irony.

_Check one more thing off the bucket list. And just in time._

It had been like something out of a dream, but better. She smiles at the thought of it. She’s never known such love. She tries to imagine how great the rest of it must be, but can’t manage it.

Ellie feels around for Riley in the darkness. She isn’t where Ellie expects her to be. Had she rolled over? Wandered off for a stroll in the rain? Gone downstairs to get their water guns back? Her frantic hands cannot find her friend and a dread begins to slowly smother her. She’s alone now. She hates being alone. They had agreed that they would stay together and she would never be alone. But she is. Again.

_Maybe she just got up to pee or something. That’s all it is. She wouldn’t leave me. Not her. Not after everything we’ve done. Especially not after…_

In the back of her mind, she begins to fully appreciate how masterfully Riley had been able to distract her today, keeping her mind off of things… with other things.

_Worst day ever. Best day ever. I wish I could pay you back for all this._

She giggles softly, trying very hard not to think about the terrible future, trying only to think of what had been shared between them. She only wants to be here now.

_Just let me get my hands on you, Riley, and I’ll get you out of this rain and warm you up. And fuck you if you’re hiding somewhere up here, ready to jump out and scare me or some shit. I’ll fucking kick your butt._

She knows she could never take Riley in a real fight. But a play fight? Who knows where that might lead now that things had changed between them. She grins at the possibilities.

_There’s a fight I’d be happy to throw. But I’d make you work for it before… surrendering…_

_Wow. I have a whole new appreciation of that word._

She sits up, stretches, looks around, sees Riley over by the far edge of the roof, standing in the corner, looking down on the city. Relief sweeps over her. She’s not going to jump out and scare her.

_Sightseeing? Really, Riley? When we could be snuggling? Weirdo._

For a moment, Ellie wants to call out. Tell her that there are more interesting things to see over here, under this tarp. She reaches for the button on her jeans, ready to slide out of them again. But something is wrong. Riley is twitching slightly. Her head shakes back and forth. Her arms hang at her sides, her fingers open and close, grasping at the night air. Her breathing is ragged, like she’s been running. Her shoulders jerk suddenly, a dreadful disjointed spasm. A repetitive, horrible, wordless sound escapes her perfect lips. She is thinly chanting the sound like a mantra. It’s almost a word. Almost. But Ellie cannot make it out. She wants to call her friend’s name, but something stops her. It takes the frightened girl a moment to realize what she’s seeing.

Her best and only friend is turning.

Ellie feels the tears come. They seem to arrive all at once. Her hand goes to her mouth to stifle a whimper. The world swims out of focus as her eyes fill with water.

_Oh, God. I haven’t started to turn yet. I haven’t started to turn._

Ellie sits frozen with fear and dread.

_What if she sees me? Is she going to attack? Should I run? Sneak off? Where can I hide? Where can I go? God, please! This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. We were going to go together. Be together. Forever, up here, locked away from everyone, where we couldn’t hurt anybody, where no one would find us, where we could stay together. Just the two of us._

_Please, God. Let me turn! Let me turn now, before she’s too far gone! Hurry!_

But nothing happens. She still feels fine. Her arm doesn’t even hurt so much anymore. The adrenaline is numbing the pain. She looks around, unsure what to do.

The door to the roof is blocked from their side. Could she sneak over there? Move the barricade? Hide in the stairwell and wait until her time comes? Would she feel the change happening? Would she know when the moment was about arrive so she could sneak back out to the roof, just in time to be with Riley?

She gets up very slowly, slips on her shoes, and creeps to the door. A large piece of machinery blocks the way down to the mall. It had taken both of them to move it here. Could she pull it aside by herself? What would Riley do when she heard the noise? She doesn’t want to think about it and instead places her hands on the machine and tries to pray, but the words won’t come.

The rain begins to fall more heavily Big fat drops. It will be a downpour soon. She watches the roof’s mottled surface underneath her shoes fill up with dark spots. There will be puddles in a few minutes. She feels very cold. She tries to remember the soft heat of Riley’s lips. The feel of her friend’s hands on her body. It seems like a lifetime ago. She crosses her arms for warmth.

There, lying on the ground by the door, is Riley’s nine millimeter. She had put it down this morning, when they dragged whatever the hell kind of machine this is over here to seal themselves safely away on the roof. Riley never picked the gun up again. She was not a fan of option number one.

Ellie looks at the pistol. Considers the weight of the machine she is leaning against. She doesn’t want to leave Riley. But she doesn’t want to be mauled to death either. She feels selfish and guilty for thinking such things, but it’s the truth.

_We can’t stay together if I let you kill me before I turn._

The rain is coming down in sheets now. She places both hands on the machine, kneels down before it. A holy altar of her desperation. She bows her head, resting it on a rusty edge. Her wet hair sticks itself in ribbons to the old paint. She decides to pray again and this time the words come. She whispers them to the to the night air…to the old, corroded device…to herself… to anyone or anything that will listen.

_Please, God. Please help me. It’s too big. It’s too big for me, God. Give me strength._

She is surprised to find her fingers of her right hand wrapping themselves around the pistol lying by her knee. She didn’t mean to reach for it. She has no memory of placing her hand down there. Her left hand remains gripped on the edge of the machine where she left it. Water washes down her face. Her back is drenched. Her tank top is soaked through now. Her hair is loose and plastered to her. She has no idea where Riley tossed the ponytail holder. She shivers from the cold. She feels the weight of Riley’s gun in her hand. The tears won’t stop flowing. They are hot on her cheeks and the cold rain doesn’t wash them away fast enough.

_Don’t make me choose. Please, God. Please. I can’t choose. I can’t. Don’t make me. Please. I can’t. I won’t. Don’t do this to me. Just give me strength. Just for a minute. Just enough to move this damn thing, okay? That’s all I need. I’m not asking for much. Please._

She places the gun on top of the case and grabs the edges of the casing. She pulls on the machinery with all her might. It doesn’t budge at all. She gasps from the exertion and pulls again, harder this time. Nothing. She waits and waits, hoping the strength will come. It doesn’t. The machine is as heavy as ever. The cold rain continues to pour down on her.

_Please._

Maybe she could climb over it somehow. Climb up and press her back to the closed door, dig her heels against the edge of the machine. If she put her whole body into the effort, maybe that would be just enough nudge it away from the door, maybe just enough to open it a little, just enough to squeeze through. But that will make noise. How fast or far can she really push this thing with her legs?

_Please! I’ve never asked you for anything! You’ve done nothing but shit on me my whole life and I’ve never asked you for a fucking thing! Please!_

The tears continue to flow. She looks up at the crying sky.

_Please. Why won’t you help me?_

The gun has found its way to her hand again. She shudders, and not from the damp cold seeping through her. No help is coming. She is all alone. She’s going to have to choose for herself. The door? Or the gun? She doesn’t know what to do. Riley isn’t here anymore to guide her. She falls to her knees, places her forehead on the machine again. The gun is heavy in her hand. Her small body shudders as she sobs uncontrollably.

_Fuck you, God._

It rains very hard in Boston that night.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Riley’s fate is left to each player to imagine. Maybe she’s just a runner when Ellie leaves the city – she would be a clicker (or almost) by the time Ellie and Joel escape the Fireflies in Utah. But for my money, when Ellie says “Her name was Riley and she was the first to die”, I don’t think Ellie was speaking metaphorically, as in “she was bitten and stopped being Riley after that.” 
> 
> When I first played the game, and Ellie tells Joel and Tess about how she snuck out to explore the mall alone and got bit by a runner, I didn’t think much about it. Seemed pretty straightforward and a compact bit of storytelling. But at the end, when she confesses to Joel that Riley was with her when she got bit, we knew after the Winter chapter, that Riley was a Firefly and Ellie had kept her bloody dog tag. “I miss you,” she said when you looked at the pendant. An older Firefly wouldn’t be palling around the mall with a kid like Ellie, so I figured Riley was only a little older than Ellie and probably her dead boyfriend. (this was before American Dreams and Left Behind pulled the lesbian rug out from under the feet of the fandom. I had the notion in my head that Ellie had breathed spores (which is why she knew for a fact that it wouldn’t hurt her) in the mall, along with Riley, and that it was Riley who had bitten her. Every time Ellie looked at that scar, tracing it with her finger, she was remembering the moment when Riley turned into a runner and attacked her (again, this was before the DLC).
> 
> We know that Ellie has a drive to survive that rivals that of Joel. If Riley turned and Ellie didn’t, Riley would attack her. Ellie would try to get away if she could, rather than kill her friend. But since Ellie says “she was the first to die”… That kind of narrows down the possibilities, doesn’t it? Ellie killed Riley and took the pendant from her dead friend’s neck. In the flashbacks of this story, Ellie continued to hide in the mall, waiting to turn. Waiting for her turn, so to speak.
> 
> This is my take on it anyway. Riley and Ellie, being good people, would probably want to make sure they couldn’t hurt anybody after they turned. Ironically, sealing themselves away up there made it impossible for Ellie to escape in time when Riley turns. What happens next adds a big heaping helping of guilt to Ellie’s psyche.
> 
> Joel carried his daughter right into the gun sight of the man that killed her. Ellie killed her best friend because she didn’t want to be mauled to death. No wonder both of them are prone to nightmares.
> 
> On a happier note, did you know that Naughty Dog made a website for the mall Ellie and Riley visit in the game? Here’s the link: http://www.libertygardensboston.com/
> 
> The song Riley sings to Ellie is Andrew W.K.’s “She Is Beautiful” and the CD they talk about is the one Ellie plays in the flashback at the end of chapter nineteen of this volume.
> 
> There will be no update on January 30. I will be away on business and won’t be able to post a chapter that weekend. So drop by February 7 for chapter twenty-five: Shelter.


	25. Shelter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel and Ellie go looking for gasoline.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 25 – Shelter**

 

“Ugh,” Ellie groaned, settling back against the wall of the storeroom, her backpack off and resting by her side, but the weight of it still pulling invisibly at her tired shoulders. “I’m so fucking pooped, dude.”

“Yeah,” Joel said from his spot a few feet away, playing with the small multi-fuel camp stove he’d found in the manager’s office closet. The cardboard box it had been in was already ripped into strips. Kindling for a campfire one of these nights, he’d told her. “But we put a good number of miles behind us today.”

_Wish we still had some wheels. Walking sucks._

“Yeah, I guess,” Ellie grunted and slid further down the wall, power-slouching in the way that only the young can. The storeroom floor was concrete and it felt cool and pleasant against her butt on this hot, sticky evening. She had unlaced her shoes before stretching out and she worked them off, one at a time, with the toes of the other foot. Her socks were soaking wet and the air felt cold and nice. She sighed, happy to sit down for a while.

_Gonna need a can opener to get these shoes off, like Jamaad used to say after Saturday drills._

She looked around the large, mostly looted space that would serve as their home for the night. The walls were undecorated, corrugated metal. Empty steel shelves ran the length of the walls, holding little more than dust bunnies and cobwebs now. But once upon a time, this place must have been packed with all kinds of stuff for camping and hunting.

_Guns. Tents. Man, I bet this was the first place to get looted when the outbreak hit._

She had read the big sign over the front door on their way into this building. “Cabela’s - World’s Foremost Outfitter,” she mumbled, mispronouncing the name unknowingly.

“What’d you say?” Joel asked idly, his eyes on the little stove and the neat folding tripod frame that had been tucked into the nylon bag with it.

“Just talking to myself,” she said. She whistled, still a novel a thing for her, but her mouth was too dry to do it right, so she unzipped her pack to dig out her water bottle. She sipped from it and thought about the big lobby on the other side of this room. There were lots of fake trees and life-sized, realistic stuffed animals: deer, bunnies, birds, you name it. There had been an enormous fish tank too, built into one wall near the fishing poles and lures, the water dark and scummy, no more than five inches deep at the bottom. Sludge. She wondered if anything was still alive in that black water. If there was, it was probably a monster of some kind. She suddenly didn’t want to think about the aquarium any more. “How many miles do you think we walked today?”

“Mmm,” Joel murmured, trying to guesstimate their mileage while simultaneously working out how to get the compact little cooking unit with its folding frame, fuel bottle, and hose back into its original bag. “More than twenty miles, I reckon. Lemme see…”

He put the stove away, mostly in its bag, and dug the map out of his pack. He unfolded it and spread it out on the floor. Ellie scooted over on her butt, her damp socks leaving little heel marks on the floor, stopping as close to him as she dared. Joel seemed to be one of those people who liked a lot of personal space.

“Okay,” he said, tracing a route on the map with his finger. “We started the day here,” making a small circle around the town of Washington, Pennsylvania. “And we followed I-79 to here, where it split off into I-70,” tapping the dot that marked the town of Triadelphia, West Virginia. “So…” he said, measuring the distance with a length of his finger and laying it alongside the bar at the corner of the map that indicated scale. “That’s about… twenty-five miles, give or take.”

Ellie leaned close, studying the map and its mysterious mix of lines and symbols. Joel guarded maps closely and never let her handle them. Without a map, they were fucked. Or so he’d said. He’d been thrilled when they’d found this map around lunchtime today, scrounging around in the wreckage of a Texaco station just off the interstate.

“If we’re in West Virginia now…” she began, her eyes scanning the edges of the map, her finger dying to touch the paper but not wanting to risk a rebuke from the priceless map’s grumpy guardian, “Where’s Wyoming?”

“About fifteen feet thataway,” Joel said, pointing to a spot across the storeroom floor.

“Really?” Ellie asked, looking back and forth worriedly, comparing the few inches they’d walked on the map today to the imaginary point way over there. She looked up at him with an expression of confusion and mild despair. “You’re serious?”

“We just crossed into West Virginia today,” Joel said, folding up the intriguing map and putting it back into his battered old pack. Ellie wanted to learn what the squiggles on the folded paper meant, but Joel didn’t share the map or the knowledge needed to decode it. Navigating was his job, he’d said. “There’s still a whole mess of states between us and Wyoming, kid. It’s gonna take a while.”

Ellie sat there in silence, trying to picture it in her head. The world outside Boston had always fascinated her, but it had been an abstract place of shifting size and scale, like a fairy tale. Now she was outside the walls and the world was suddenly very real. And very big. And her feet were very tired. She missed the big GMC truck they’d found with Bill.

“Fuck,” she sighed.

“Yep,” Joel said, nonplussed. He knew the world outside the QZ walls. It was just as big and shitty as it had been the last time he was out here. He pulled a can of peas out of his backpack, followed by a small can of Vienna sausages. Scavenging had been poor today. There wasn’t much meat left. But if he could find a little gasoline or diesel for the stove, at least meals would be warm in the future.

“Think we’ll be there by Christmas?” the girl asked, a good ten or twelve inches closer to him that he would have liked, watching him open the can of veggies with his old can opener. She watched everything he did, it seemed. She was curious. She never stopped asking questions. She had no idea how much he wanted her to be quiet for a while. She wanted them to be friends, that was obvious. Joel knew better than to make a friend of her. Bill was right. That shit got you killed. He never wanted any part of this deal right from the start.

“Christmas? No chance of that,” he said, working his fingertip under the ring of the pull top lid for the can of cocktail sausages. “We’ll cross the bridge into Ohio tomorrow…get through that state soon enough and then… maybe … _maybe_ a good bit across Indiana. But it’s almost October. In six or seven weeks, we’ll have to find a place to hunker down for the winter. Get caught out in the open by an early snow with no supplies and that’ll be the end of it, kid. So we find a good spot, stock up, and wait it out. Come spring, we’ll start walkin’ again.”

_Cooped up all winter with a grumpy old man like you. How fucking wonderful that’s going to be. Kill me now._

Ellie frowned and grumbled, “I’ll be an old lady by the time we get to Wyoming.”

 

* * *

 

The sign was several very pretty shades of blue. A dark blue silhouette of a cowboy rode a bucking horse against the backdrop of a light blue mountain with a cloudy, medium blue sky behind. The letters were a golden yellow. Green eyes behind pink sunglasses read them and crinkled at the edges in delight.

           WELCOME TO  
              WYOMING

          FOREVER WEST

On the high seat of the speeding Honda, Ellie began to cheer and wiggle, dancing from the waist up. The joy in her voice could not be muffled by the red motorcycle helmet she wore. She patted Joel’s shoulders excitedly and he smiled. The beat she drummed out on him was infectious. He whooped once, a wild Texas rebel yell. For a moment, the unexpected joy he displayed shocked her into an open-mouthed, wide-eyed, ecstatic silence.

A second later, she mimicked his sound, howling into the rushing wind. He laughed. She joined him in that too.

 

* * *

 

“We made it, dude!” she exclaimed and hugged him from behind, squishing his backpack against him, her helmeted head pressed against the side of his neck. “Wyoming! Woo!”

“We sure did, kiddo,” he allowed with a small, tight grin as he brought the bike to a stop. “We sure did.”

The kickstand came down, the engine stopped, and the keys to the motorcycle went into his jacket’s inside pocket. He checked the early morning sun, using his fingers and the horizon to approximate the time, a trick Ellie was dying to learn. Not even nine in the morning yet. He smiled. This was good news. Lots of time to scavenge this place for supplies.

“Climb on down, girl,” he said. “And no more hollerin’. We don’t know this place.”

She nodded, sliding over the side to the ground, slipping the helmet off her head but leaving her heart-shaped sunglasses on. She adjusted them slightly as she hung the helmet on the backseat armrest by its chinstrap. She looked around at the parking lot of the Farmer’s Bank where they had come to a stop. The thick windows were still intact.

“We going banking?” she asked.

“Gonna check these cars for gas,” Joel said, pulling the siphoning hose from his pack, nodding with his chin towards a row of old vehicles.

“How are we doing in that department?” she asked, cradling her shotgun, hoping she had used the phrase correctly. They hadn’t had much luck in their search for gasoline lately. Most of the cars they had found recently were missing their gas caps, their tanks bone dry for years. She remembered the first few days of their journey out of Pittsburgh, on foot mile after mile. She didn’t want to go back to that.

Joel didn’t see the point in lying to her. “Low fuel light came on just before I pulled in here.”

“Ouch. That’s not good,” she deadpanned.

“It sure ain’t,” he agreed. “Get that empty jug out of the back and keep your fingers crossed that we find some ‘go-juice’ in this rinky-dink town.”

She giggled at his choice of words. Rinky-dink and go-juice were going into her vocabulary starting now.

“Pine Bluffs is gonna be good to us,” she chirped, ever the optimist. “You’ll see.”

 

* * *

 

Footsteps on empty streets. Block after block. Echoing off cracked and crumbling brick walls. This place was a ghost town. Not a very big one, but an hour had passed already and they still hadn’t explored half the streets. It took longer to do everything on foot. The plastic jug stubbornly remained empty.

 

* * *

 

“Texas Trail Museum… Texas Trail Market… Is Wyoming close to Texas?”

“Nope.”

“Then what’s the deal, dude?”

“Don’t know. Been kind’ve puzzled about that myself, to tell the truth.”

“Weird.”

“Yeah.”

“Anything in there?”

“Nope. Dry as a bone, kid. Same as the other one.”

“Shit.”

 

* * *

 

“Miller Street,” she said, pointing to the street sign with a grin.

“Yep,” Joel said.

“Keep your eyes open for Williams Street,” she smiled. “If we find one, then that’s gotta be a good omen, right?”

“Sure,” he said.

He hadn’t decided if he preferred the quiet Ellie of the last few days or the return of the nonstop chatter of talkative Ellie. Both had their good points. At least she wasn’t walking along the edge of the curb as though it was a tightrope, the way she used to do when they first met. She was taking this her job as a sidekick seriously now – more or less. She was pretty grown up for a teenager, he thought. But then, in a world like this, she had to be. They’d come a long way together, him and this kid, and he was developing a kind of respect for her. She had earned it. She had nice tits too, though he was trying hard not to think about it. He grimaced and adjusted the sling of the hunting rifle over his shoulder with the hand that wasn’t holding the shotgun and took another look around.

The town was small, a few hundred houses, maybe a thousand residents or so before the outbreak. This had probably been a nice place to live once, if you didn’t mind living in a quiet town. But now it was just empty streets and dilapidated structures that had once been homes. Nobody lived here anymore. Nobody had lived here in a long time. Nothing moved in these streets but tumbleweeds.

But people had been come through here since the outbreak, quite a few of them, stopping just long enough to clean out every damn gas tank in town before moving on, it seemed. When the bank parking lot had proved fruitless, he had pushed the bike between two big SUVs, out of sight of the highway. Hopefully, no one would come along and steal their supplies. It didn’t seem likely, but you never knew.

“Seventh Street. Lucky number,” she burbled happily as she strolled alongside him, shotgun ready, eyes seeing everything, mind bubbling over with oddball questions, God only knew how many she had and where on earth she came up with them. She was still on her period, but the worst of the cramps were gone. Now she was starving all the time and counting down the days until it was behind her again for another month. “Ooh! Gator’s Motel. Neat. Ever stay at a Gator’s, Joel?”

“Can’t say that I have,” he said and tried to savor the precious few moments of silence before she hit with another weird question.

Not even half a gallon in this jug, he thought. Dregs I’m gonna hafta filter before I pour it in the tank. Gotta do better than that. Gotta find at least a gallon or two. Gotta keep my hands off her tits too. Gotta do a lot of things right. Gotta get her to Tommy before I fuck up again. That ain’t gonna be easy to explain to her. She ain’t –

“Dinosaur!” she exclaimed, pointing ahead.

Joel looked. Blinked.

Indeed, there was a dinosaur.

**. . .**

Ellie handed him her shotgun and began to climb up onto its back.

“You know what kind of dinosaur is this?” she asked.

“A big plastic one,” Joel said, nonplussed.

It was a cartoony shade of green, bleached a bit on the top surfaces, but still vibrant under the chin and along the belly. It was about three and half feet at the crest of the back and a bit under seven feet tall at the top of the head. The tail stretched out behind the body for another three or four feet. It was rounded and friendly, made to draw the eyes of children in the backseats of cars passing by. The sign on the brownish red brick wall behind it stated clearly:

            DO NOT PLAY ON OR AROUND  
           NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR INJURIES

Ellie ignored the sign. The law didn’t apply to badasses destined to save the world.

“I think it’s an apatasaurus,” she replied gleefully, unfazed at his lack of excitement. She didn’t quite get the name right, but the fiberglass dinosaur was more of a toy than an accurate recreation, so it hardly mattered if she couldn’t remember the precise name.

“Thought it was a brontosaurs,” he said.

“Brontosauruses were never real. They were a hoax, or something.”

”That a fact?” he asked, an eyebrow cocked, watching the empty streets warily. The weird mix of things this girl knew and didn’t know was always surprising and oddly fascinating.

“Yep. Like… um… whatchamacallit… that caveman skeleton somebody faked to get famous. I read about it in one of my National Geographics.” She grinned at him, thrilled to be teaching him something.

“I didn’t know that. Thought brontosauruses were real. I reckon The Flintstone’s lied to me. Hell, I don’t know what to believe now.” He smiled a bit, trying to be good-natured about this minor delay. There was still a lot of daylight left. Either they’d find some gas and be on their way, or they’d be spending the night here before walking tomorrow.

“Flintstones?” She placed her hands at the base of its neck and kicked it gently with the invisible spurs on her heels. She wished it was real and that she and Joel could ride it to his brother’s house. That would make a great first impression, she was sure of it.

Joel scratched his chin and considered how much longer he should allow to let her kill time like this. “Remember that box of cereal we found in that house? The one you said looked like candy? Had a cartoon guy on the box you said looked like me if I shaved my beard.”

“Oh yeah! Fruit something or other!”

“Fruity Pebbles,” Joel said. “That was from The Flintstones. It was a cartoon once upon a time. Had cavemen and dinosaurs and stuff in it. Used to watch it on Saturday mornin’s when I was eating my cereal.”

“You guys had it so good,” she said, sliding down from the large green sauropod and accepting the return of her shotgun from Joel. “Cartoons on TV and candy for breakfast. So fucking cool.”

“Yeah. We had gas in all the pumps too,” he groused. “Now c’mon. Let’s keep lookin’.”

“Lead the way, boss.”

**. . .**

Seventh Street dead-ended after another block. The Sinclair Oil station with its big plastic dinosaur was behind them now as they doubled back and cut across the Lincoln Highway to explore another part of the town.

“That guy on the box of cereal, the Fruity Pebbles one,” she asked as innocently as she could, careful not to make eye contact, sly and street smart in a way that would have made Riley proud. “What was his name?”

“Why?” he snorted. “So you can start callin’ me that all the time?”

“Ooohhhh,” she enthused with awe and snickered sweetly. “Saw that one coming, huh?”

Joel chuckled. Ellie knuckled him in the arm, gently, affectionately.

She was so proud of him. “Got to step up my game, I see.”

“Yes, you do, kid.”

 

* * *

 

“There,” he said, holding the beam of his flashlight steady. “Under those tarps. There in the corner. Those barrels. See?”

“Gas?” she asked, her face close to the dirty glass, hands pressed against it, blocking out the glare of the sun. It was dark in there and the air was filled with spores. All she could see what the little circle illuminated by his light. Large plastic barrels, some blue, some yellow, others black, peeked out from behind the edge of a set of tarps that had been dislodged by ceiling tiles that had recently fallen in from accumulated years of rain damage to an old, leaky roof.

“Gas or diesel,” he said. “Probably some of each.”

The Pine Bluffs Community Center was locked up tight. None of the windows were broken and a rusty old barbed wire fence surrounded it. Two thick blankets stolen from a nearby house had been draped across the top of the fence, making a safe path over it.

“How come nobody’s cleaned this place out yet?” she asked.

“Place is kind of out of the way, away from the highway. Maybe looters comin’ through town never noticed it sittin’ over here,” Joel shrugged. “Or maybe they did. Came in another door but missed those barrels under the tarp? Don’t know. Doesn’t matter. If that’s fuel waitin’ for us in there, then I’m thankful.”

“Me too,” she grinned and followed him around the side of the building to the parking lot and the front doors.

**. . .**

                         FEMA SHELTER AREA  
                      NO ENTRY OR REMOVAL  
               AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

          USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED

The sign was old, of course. Yellow with black letters. Sun-faded and rusting in places.

Cordyceps spores hung thick in the stale air of the lobby on the other side of smoked glass double doors. The lock for the doors had been busted out years before but the doors had been pushed shut and held closed from the outside by a length of pipe threaded through the handles. Somebody had gone inside years before and tried to prevent whatever they found in there from following them out.

Joel scowled and tried to judge the age of the improved lock. That pipe had been holding those doors closed a while, it seemed. Rust stains from it ran down the front of the doors.

A stiff breeze blew across the parking lot, making the tattered ruin of the two collapsed cabin tents that had been set up as some sort of primitive screening checkpoint before anyone would be allowed inside the safety of the designated shelter made from the community center. The tents were all a jumble of rusted poles and pathetic strips of canvas now. Ellie hugged herself, chilled by more than just the wind.

“We going inside?” she asked.

“You want to walk to Jackson?” he asked, putting his gas mask on.

“Not really,” she said. “But I’m not too crazy about going in there either.”

“Same here,” he grumbled and worked the steel pipe free with a rusting squeal.

**. . .**

                 PLEASE FORM A LINE HERE  
           WE ARE DOING THE BEST WE CAN  
             THERE’S ROOM FOR EVERYONE

The words were almost gone, faded away to faint traces on the big marker board that had been drilled into the wall of the lobby. The mounting work had been done hastily it seemed, as the board was slightly crooked. Not enough to require rehanging, but just enough to draw attention to itself.

There were no bodies in the lobby, but spores drifted lazily through the daylight that filtered in from the dirty windows. The source was somewhere down the dark hallway at the end of the lobby.

_Cordyceps likes the darkness. Too much sunlight in here. They would have found someplace else to die._

Suitcases and dufflebags were lined up along the wall to the right of the double doors. A small pet carrier was among them, the little door open and no furry friend inside. A log book had been on the reception desk, on the other side of the lobby, across from the wall with all the luggage. Joel was thumbing through it, skimming and skipping entire pages.

A Christmas tree was in the corner across from the sign, fake, but of a high quality, and only partly decorated. Cordyceps spores had settled along its branches, almost like snow. A long string of multicolored lights was wound around it, unplugged, but the silver and red tinsel garland only made two or three loose loops around the top of the tree, the rest hanging down and piling on the ground in a tangle. Three opened boxes of ornaments lay around the base of the tree. One ornament had been dropped, metallic green glass strewn out in a spray across the floor. The other ornaments were still in the box. The sight of it made Ellie sad. Memories of the paper snowflakes she and Riley had cut from the pages of their old homework wavered in the back of her mind. They had hung the snowflakes from the ceiling with bits of string and thumbtacks stolen from the classrooms bulletin boards. They’d always wanted a Christmas tree of some kind in their room. Linh, with her crazy construction paper skills, always had a cute little tree of some kind in her dorm room with adorable tissue paper and gum wrapper decorations. Every winter, Riley always joked about stealing it from her, but she never went through with it. Riley didn’t steal from friends. She showed Ellie how to make snowflakes from geometry homework instead and that was good enough for Room 529.

“Ellie!” hissed Joel.

She looked. He was standing by the ‘Employees Only’ door behind the reception desk, a broken shiv in his hand. The door was open a little, the lock broken. The flashlight wrapped tightly with parachute cord to the shoulder strap of his backpack was on. Spores floated lightly in the brightness of its beam.

She blinked. How long had she been staring at the sad plastic tree? How long had it been waiting for someone to finish decorating it? What had happened here? And why did it have to happen at Christmas?

She flicked her own light on and trotted over to him. Along the way, she tried to seal her emotions up tightly. She was frowning and she couldn’t hide it. She wasn’t wearing a gas mask like he was.

_Fucking hormones._

**. . .**

The office had once been the domain of two women before the outbreak. Their personal touches were everywhere: pictures of families, funny cartoons printed out from the internet or clipped from newspapers, cute plastic knickknacks, a small teddy bear holding a big red heart with the words ‘Beary Special’ stitched across the crimson satin. This had been a nice place to work once.

After the outbreak, it had become the headquarters for a town fighting desperately to keep itself alive.

Cardboard boxes filled with paperwork, forms hastily completed, scrawled handwriting in pencil towards the end, where before the all-important boxes had been neatly filled in by a computer and an office printer. The frantic last days of this place could be read in the mass of notes tacked over other notes on the corkboard by the empty water cooler.

 

          Pam,  
          Moved the water jugs into conf room B.  
          Mary said we needed to keep stuff like  
          that locked up now. Batteries too. FYI  
          Tierce 11/24

 

          Mary  
          Albert got bit. I took care of it. Somebody  
          needs to tell Claude. I can’t do it. Going  
          to Hereford to scrounge instead. Sorry.  
          Zoë

 

          St. Paul’s is full. Don’t send any more here.  
          Try UMC? Or Assembly of God maybe?  
          Sorry, Pam. I’d help you if I could. Josh.

 

          Pam -  
          I want to drive Dr Landers to Burns on Mon.  
          JT says they radioed us and said that they  
          need a doctor and would trade some ammo  
          for a house call. Landers is willing. Are you?  
          1500 bullets they said!! pistol/rifle mix.  
          - Mary

 

          Claude says Rite Aid is cleaned out!!!  
          Tierce 11/29

 

          FEMA was supposed to be here last week!  
          Phone lines still busy. Always busy! Should  
          we try short wave? Or send somebody to  
          Cheyenne? I don’t know what to do? Nancy

 

          ATTENTION EVERYONE!  
          More people are coming in every day and we  
          may need to put a “no food, no shelter” rule  
          in place soon! I hate to do it but we’re going  
          to have to get tough about this before it gets  
          worse in here! Nobody should get in for free!  
          - Pam

 

          Mary,  
          Zöe reports that Bushnell has signs up that say  
          “fuck off!” Fence too. Just thought you should  
          know. I’ve told Gerry, Ken, Leroy and Claude.  
          Tierce 12/1

 

          Pam -  
          One of the new folks got beaten into a coma  
          last night. Started coughing real bad in the  
          showers and people panicked afraid she was  
          infected. Somebody grabbed a chair... :(  
          Dr Landers says shes a lost cause but shes  
          not infected. How do you want to handle  
          this mess Pam? Im at a loss to be honest.  
          - Mary

 

          M or P,  
          Tell Zoe that Harrisburg is no go now.  
          Somebody was shooting at us from the  
          kindergarten when we tried to look for that  
          guy JT heard on the shortwave radio. Need  
          a new spare tire now for my truck!  
          GW

 

          Priest in Carpenter says he’s got a generator  
          we can have if we take in a dozen of his people.  
          We don’t have the food to spare but we REALLY  
          need that generator! What do you think Pam?  
          Talk to JT. He had the guy on the CB last night!  
          Ken say’s he’s willing to go. Nancy

 

          Anybody want to ride with me to Albin? Said  
          on the radio that they’ll trade gas for ammo.  
          Liz says she knows one of them so its probably  
          safe. Any takers? Let me know ASAP :)  
          Claude

 

          Pam and Mary,  
          No more medical supplies or food from FEMA.  
          Cheyenne is off limits now! The army told us to  
          turn back. Saw them shoot a guy who wouldn’t  
          get back in his truck. Not kidding! FEMA isn’t  
          coming back here. Time to accept that, people!  
          GW

 

          JT -  
          Number three jenny is dead. We’re okay for  
          heat but it needs to be fixed soon. Tell GW  
          to bring his tools when he gets back! If we  
          run those two generators without a third to  
          spell them, they’re going to wear out that  
          much faster. I don’t want to be in the dark!  
          Tell him “Help us, Gerry Wan Kenobi!  
          You’re our only hope!” ;)  
          - Pam

 

          Pam  
          Gerry never arrived at Alliance!! Should have  
          been there by now. They say he never showed  
          up and they can’t spare anybody to search for  
          him. 2 hour drive. Anybody want help me  
          search for him? We need GW! We should do  
          something!  
          Zoë

 

          Pam -  
          Driving to Burns tomorrow. Hopefully they  
          will be willing to trade gas for food again.  
          - Mary

 

          Ken and Leroy have’nt come back from  
          Ponnequin yet. Do you think the army patrols  
          caught them? Pretty close to Cheyenne. Nancy

 

          HELP!  
          Taking the long way around to St. Peter Parish  
          on Wensday. If anybody wants to come with  
          and help me load up that generator I could use  
          the help. Pretty sure I can sneak past the army  
          patrols. WE NEED THIS GENERATOR! It  
          will be worth every bullet we’re trading for it!  
          Somebody please help me with this! Please!  
          Claude

 

          ATTENTION EVERYONE!!!  
          More coming in tonight?! Just because they  
          were turned away at Cheyenne WE have to  
          take them in?!? We can’t take anymore! Tell Zoe  
          to stop giving out our address to everyone she  
          meets! We’re not going to last until spring like  
          this! Same goes for you, JT! Radio silence  
          from now on unless I say otherwise! Got it?!  
          THIS IS THE LAST GROUP OK!!! NO MORE!!  
          - PAM

 

          Pamela,  
          I’m sorry but Claude won’t live through the  
          night. The blood loss was too great. If you  
          want to say anything to him, please hurry.  
          Blaine Landers

 

          Has anybody heard from Mary?

 

Ellie turned over the piece of paper she held in her hands. She had found it on the floor, just inside the room. Someone had pushed it under the office door a long time ago. The hastily scrawled note on back side of the paper had been written with a thick permanent marker, the dark green letters a wobbly scrawl, the hand that had made them trembling with panic at the time.

              NO WAY OUT!  
          PLEASE LET ME IN!

The other side of the brightly colored pastel blue paper had been printed out years before on an very nice office copier, back when times were good and the world was safe and needed places like community centers for purposes other than a last place to hide and wait for death as the world ended. It was covered along the top edge with neat little cartoon rainbows and clouds. Cute clipart doodles of horses played in the margins at the bottom of the page, frolicking in wavy green grass with little cowboys and cowgirls.

          Looking for somewhere to have a kid’s  
          birthday party? Come on down to the  
          Pine Bluffs Community Center!

          Gym! Showers! Kitchen! Playground!  
          Reasonable Rates! Fun loving staff!  
          Call Mary or Pam for more information.

Ellie looked to Joel, hoping for some kind of acknowledgement, some sort of affirmation that he shared her queasy sense of loss for what had happened to the people here in the years before she was born.

Joel said nothing. The few items in here worth taking were in his pack now. The key ring for the many doors in this place was in his hand. He squeezed her shoulder, a small comfort at best, and stepped back out in to the hallway.

She wadded up the paper and threw it angrily across the room, towards the big desk and the office chair with the fluffy old spore mound that had once been Pam, if the ‘Pam Is Da Boss!’ plaque on the desk was any indication. There was a gun beneath that chair, lost under that thick pile of spores, and a bullet hole in the wall behind the desk, also hidden by the fungus crawling up the surface. Any brains or blood that had been sprayed across that wall had been consumed by the parasitic, fuzzy growth years before.

Ellie wiped at the corner of her eyes with her thumb and left the room.

**. . .**

“I don’t get it,” Ellie whispered as quietly as she could. She couldn’t hold the words inside anymore.

She stood close to Joel at the long, stainless steel kitchen sink, pouring water carefully from a tall plastic cup into a white plastic jug with a brittle plastic wrapper bearing the words ‘SunnyD’. They had picked out the cleanest jugs from the trash piled up at the back of the room, rinsing them clean for the gasoline they’d found in the red plastic barrel beneath the rotten old tarp. The water in the pitcher they were using to fill their cups had come from one of the blue barrels, still holding fifty gallons of old, stale water.

Joel sighed, but Ellie ignored it. She wanted to talk about this.

“Don’t get what?” he finally said in a low, hoarse rumble.

“No mandatory evacuation signs on the streets. Just FEDRA – er, I mean FEMA signs and that shelter tag in the parking lot.”

“Yeah?” he asked, swirling the water around inside the half-gallon apple-cherry juice jug.

She huffed, trying to find the words. She wanted him to get her point, even if it wasn’t entirely formed in her mind.

“I guess,” she hemmed, “… it’s just… with Cheyenne so close, why couldn’t they send some help to these people? It’s not far, you know? They could have saved these people.”

“Ellie,” Joel began, his irritation easy to hear, even though his mask.

“I know, I know,” she grunted. “It’s just so shitty, how they left people to die everywhere.”

“Yeah, it was,” Joel said. “But that’s just how it happened. There wasn’t anything anyone could do… There just wasn’t time.”

She was silent, placing the SunnyD jug on the flat steel surface next to the sink and picking up a gallon jug with a thin funky handle. The label on that one read ‘Ocean Spray 100% Cranberry Juice’. She refilled her cup from the pitcher and began to pour water into the empty jug.

“Leave ‘em upside down in the sink,” Joel said, demonstrating. “The water will drip out and they’ll dry faster.”

“Okay.” Sad and unhappy. She did as she was told and flipped over her SunnyD jug. Through the big window at the end of the gym, to which the kitchen was attached, she could see the fading but still bright colors of the playground equipment out on the grassy lawn. She very much wanted to be out in the sunlight again. Her sigh said so.

She had more to say on the subject of this place. Or maybe she needed to hear something from him regarding it, something to put her mind at ease about this place and the rooms full of dead people turned to fuzzy, fluffy pillows of infection twenty years ago. Joel shook out the last droplets of water from the rectangular ‘Crystal Geyser’ jug and decided that she would make for better company today if he would just make a small effort on her behalf.

“When it hit…” Joel began with no small amount of hesitation. Ellie stopped swishing, hanging on his every word. “It hit fast, Red. I mean _fast_. Like a summer hurricane blowin’ in from the ocean and slammin’ into Boston. Clouds in the mornin’ on the horizon. Rain by lunch. Windows breakin’ from the godawful wind by supper. _That_ kind of fast, yeah?”

“Wow,” Ellie said, remembering to swish her jug again. She had experienced a few such storms in her life. “That’s pretty fucking fast.”

“Yeah, it was,” he said, flipping the jug over to dry, wiping his hands on an old rag he produced from his pocket. The dishtowels in here weren’t safe to touch. Fuzzy white patches grew in puffy tufts everywhere the sunlight didn’t reach. “It didn’t matter how much somebody wanted to help, there just wasn’t much anybody could do, kiddo. If you weren’t in just the right spot when it started, then you probably weren’t gonna make it. We were lucky we were so close to Austin, Tommy and me…”

He trailed off. Behind the fogged lenses of his mask, his eyes were a thousand miles, a thousand years away. He wiped the face of his old watch clean with the rag before putting it away.

Ellie said nothing. There was something there, but she didn’t pry. She looked out into the empty kitchen instead and her eyes went to the chalkboard behind the serving window. Someone had written on it with pink and white chalk.

 

          DEC 17  
          Breakfast: Pancakes! :)  
          Lunch: Soup + Sandwiches  
          Dinner: Chicken Fingers + Peach Cobbler :D

 

“Chicken _fingers?_ ” she asked, her voice echoing in the empty chamber. “Is that a joke?”

Joel chuckled, glad for the distraction from old, bad memories.

“Seriously, dude. I don’t get it.”

 

* * *

 

The jugs of gas were heavy as fuck and she told him so.

“I should be the one complainin’. I’m carryin’ four. You’re just carryin’ two,” he smirked.

“My hands are smaller,” she grumbled and stuck out her tongue at him.

“We’re almost there, squirt.”

She wasn’t actually grumpy. She was thinking about the lake cabin and the magic recliner with the fat, poofy cushions. She was thinking about his hands on her body. She wanted to tell him how wonderful it felt and how she was almost coming apart of the seams, overstuffed with hope and excitement that they might do that again, very soon. She wanted to say these things but she was afraid the words would get tangled up in her throat, which felt unusually tight whenever she remembered that amazing chair and those incredible hands. Every time she looked at his big hands holding the handles of the plastic jugs, memories of those hands, callused but skillful, caressing her breasts.

It wasn’t safe to say anything but she knew that he would start to wonder if she didn’t. She talked all the time. He knew it. She knew it. She had to say _something_.

“You know something…” she began, nonchalant in the way that drew attention to itself.

“What’s that?” Joel replied, noticing how hard she was working to appear casual but keeping that to himself.

“I kept expecting one of those fungus blobs to get up and attack us.”

“Those things were too far gone to be any threat to anyone, kiddo.”

“You don’t know,” she teased, grinning,” there might have been a clicker hiding under all that stuff. It would be the perfect disguise!”

Joe snorted. “Jesus. Let’s hope they don’t figure out that trick.”

“Or,” Ellie opined happily, “we could be the first to find a new stage of infection. We’d be famous! _Famouser_ , I mean.”

He chuckled. “You think so, huh?”

The girl continued with building enthusiasm for this line of though, “Why not? They could finally be the cute and cuddly kind of the infected that everyone’s been waiting for. They just floop around, harmless and poofy, like big pillows.”

She giggled as Joel shook his head.

“‘Floop’?” he deadpanned.

“Duh. That’s the sound pillows make as they walk around,” she said with feigned exasperation, as though this was a word that everyone should know.

“All right then,” he said. She was an odd one, this girl, but charming.

They walked in silence for a few moments, covering the last few blocks to the hidden motorcycle and its empty fuel tank. The jugs of gasoline weren’t quite so heavy to those with a light heart.

“ _Floop_ ,” she repeated in her best teacher-voice.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally a very different chapter. Joel and Ellie were going to encounter bandits in the first draft. The villains were changed to a ragtag unit of soldiers who had escaped a collapsing QZ and were scrounging for fuel and food in the second draft. In both versions, Joel and Ellie would have been separated during the battle, with Joel fighting outside the shelter and Ellie using her spore immunity to hide inside the building and pick off the baddies who followed her inside. At one point, there would have been a pair of bloaters to contend with as well. But as I began to hash out the details of the shelter and its backstory, the more I liked the idea of just focusing on the place itself and the artifacts Joel and Ellie would find there. It’s not quite a haunted house story, but I felt it had a nice sense of melancholy to it, just one more sign of how people struggled to hold on during the outbreak and now, twenty years later, how empty the world has become.
> 
> Also, the opening flashback takes place the day before they find the bike in the first chapter of volume one. It was interesting to rejoin those earlier versions of the characters, before they became attracted to each other and still didn’t know each other very well. Also note that Joel doesn’t trust Ellie with that map at the point and now she’s the navigator, picking out routes and figuring out detours. How far she’s come!
> 
> The Texas Cattle Trail ran through Wyoming, in case you were wondering.
> 
> Piltdown Man was a hoax. The brontosaurs was an honest mistake
> 
> There really are (were?) green fiberglass dinosaurs outside the Sinclair Stations in Wyoming. Look them up. They’re kind of neat. Also, when I was a kid, brontosauruses were real. I first I lost them, and now Pluto is no longer a planet. Some wounds never heal, Scientific Community. Stop playing games with my dino-loving, star-gazing heart!
> 
> Joel and Ellie are finally in Wyoming. Just five more chapters to go before we wrap this up!
> 
> There will be no update on January 30. I will be away on business and won’t be able to post a chapter that weekend. So drop by February 7 for chapter twenty-six: Tess.


	26. Tess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tess and Joel find a way to kill some time on a lazy evening in Boston.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boom! An update! And it’s still technically Saturday here in Texas, so I’m chalking this one up in the “win” column. ;-)

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 26 – Tess**

 

Joel followed Tess down the hallway. They had just come from Ned’s, a dingy little bar in the North End District, a seedy, somewhat dangerous place tucked away in a corner of the black market where the army rarely went. It was what passed for fine dining these days, especially among those who skirted the edge of the law on a daily basis.

Imminent curfew was being announced from every PA speaker in the city. Ten minutes before everyone but the army had to be off the streets. Ten minutes. There was no way Joel was going to make it to his own apartment tonight. The Fireflies had been stirring up shit for the last two weeks: a handful of random bombings, two sniper attacks, a kidnapping, and more graffiti tags appearing across the residential blocks than anyone could count. The soldiers were out in force, scouring the QZ for the Fireflies or anyone who might be reasonably mistaken as such – officers weren’t too picky about those they imprisoned and the soldiers were looking to fill their assigned quotas. Malcontents were to be rounded up wherever possible and Joel looked the part. He was going to have to crash at her place tonight.

It was the first time he had been here in a month, he realized. A low feud was simmering between he and Tess these last few weeks. Nothing too serious, nothing that might leave him looking for a new job. But with women, things like that could blow up into something larger with little or no warning.

A future, larger fight might be on the horizon, but the coast looked clear at the moment. She had made a good effort to reconnect with him this morning, showing up at his apartment with the gift of new socks, still in the original plastic bag – a hard thing to find in a world increasingly picked clean. He had bought dinner for her this evening, and dessert too, fresh strawberries sprinkled with a light dusting of white sugar. As they were leaving Ned’s, she had made the offer to let him stay the night at her place rather than risk being caught out after curfew by an army patrol. Things were looking better. A little, at least.

“Make yourself at home, Texas,” she said as she worked her key into the lock of the door.

He made a slow, strolling, straight line for the sofa and settled down on the worn but still plump cushions with a contended grunt.

“Drink?” she asked, locking the door behind her. Her dark eyes glimmered playfully. Or was he just imagining that?

“Nah, I’m fine,” Joel said. He’d had two beers at Ned’s. It helped the taste of the mystery meat go down a little easier. He was relaxed just enough to push his luck a little. He didn’t beat around the bush, choosing to say the words instead. “We still fightin’?”

“We were,” she answered in a voice silky smooth and erotically husky. He wasn’t imagining it. She switched on her old stereo. ZZ Top’s ‘Got Me Under Pressure’ began to play. It was the most southern fried album she had and she knew he liked it. “But now I’ve decided that we’re not fighting anymore. We’ve made up and put it behind us.”

“That so?” he said, smiling crookedly, a little expectantly.

“It is,” she said, pivoting smoothly and strutting to the kitchen. “We’re letting it go… like grown ups.”

“Good to know,” he said, watching her hips swing as she passed. “And just what is it exactly that we’re puttin’ behind us? If you don’t mind me askin’.”

“Your pigheadedness,” she called from the kitchen. Glass was clinking together in there, just out of sight.

“That does seem to be a problem from time to time, don’t it?” he chuckled, settling into the thick cushions.

He thought about pressing the issue further, presenting his side of the thing that had come between them, but Joel knew when to call a draw a victory. Sometimes it was the best a man could hope for.

“So we’ve made up and put it behind us,” she repeated, just a little smugly. Joel couldn’t see into the kitchen from his spot on the couch, but the satisfied smirk of victory could be her heard easily enough in her voice.

“Mighty generous of you to let me know, Tess,” Joel said, his mouth quirking into a faint smile. “I appreciate it.”

“I’m incredibly generous,” Tess said, returning with the drinks. “When I want to be.”

Two glasses of bourbon held in one hand and what little was left of the rich, amber liquor sloshing around inside the brown bottle held in her other hand. Hips swaying just a little more than walking would require of them.

Joel couldn’t help but notice.

She’s putting a little extra wiggle in that walk, he thought. She trying to butter me up for something?

He took the glass she offered him, the ice cubes inside rattling gently as they floated in a tiny lake of savory gold. He hadn’t asked for a drink. He’d specifically said he didn’t want one. He smiled and nodded anyway. This wasn’t a thing worth fighting over.

She sat down next to him, her thighs not quite touching his, but very close all the same. The already warm air grew warmer between them.

“Got the ice maker fixed, I see,” Joel observed. Beads of water were beginning to form on the surface of the small, clear tumbler. It was early September, a humid, muggy time of year for Boston.

“Yep,” Tess replied. “I told Bill I needed a new whatsahoozits for it and he scrounged one up for me. Crazy guy can find any damn thing you need, I swear.”

“Is that what you asked for? A whatsahoozits?” Joel chuckled.

“My exact words,” she grinned. “I told him what it was doing. That weird sound it was making. He nodded and said he knew what the problem was. Different this time. Not the thingamabob that went out last summer. Something else was broken this time. Not the thingamabob, but some other thing. Bill knew what it needed.”

“It needed a new whatsahoozits,” Joel nodded in complete understanding.

“Yep,” she giggled, a delightfully girlish sound, and sipped at her bourbon.

She was wearing lipstick, Joel noticed, and it left a waxy mark on the edge of the glass. Tess rarely wore lipstick. It was in scare supply and too impractical for her to wear very often considering how much it cost. She only wore makeup on special occasions. She was wearing blush too, and a hint of eye shadow. She’d been wearing it when he picked her up on the way to Ned’s. Joel relaxed a little more. Things were clearly going well.

She’s serious about making up, I reckon, he mused, pleased with this turn of events.

He said nothing for a few moments. Neither did she. He was enjoying the silence but he quickly detected that she was expecting him to say something. He wasn’t sure what. With Tess, saying anything other than the thing she was expecting him to say could throw this entire evening into a tailspin. Joel smiled tightly and swallowed a chuckle. It wasn’t just Tess. Most every woman he’d ever let into his life had expected him to be a mind reader sooner or later. He had yet to develop any psychic powers, unfortunately. He sighed and stretched and sipped a little bourbon. It was good stuff and he wondered where she’d dug it up.

“Wild Bill,” he chuckled, saying something without saying anything at all. “Crazy jackass can fix anything, yeah? He welds, fixes engines, makes his own bullets, cooks, sews, gardens… Self-sufficient, that’s for sure. Wonder if he went to school to learn how to do all that… or maybe it’s those voices inside his head tellin’ him how to do all that stuff.”

She snickered. These weren’t the words she had expected, but they weren’t exactly the wrong words either. Joel was a bit blunt in his feelings and even more blunt in how he expressed them. She could tell he was trying, in his way, and she decided that she could be content with that. He was trying.

“Yep,” Tess said, settling in on the sofa, easing herself against him. His body felt good against hers. “One of the voices must be my grandma. Remember that cranberry jelly he gave us last Christmas? My grandma used to make stuff like that. I loved going to her house. She always had cookies.”

Joel chuckled and slipped an arm around her shoulder. “Mine too. She used to make this stuff… Jalapeno pepper jelly. Mmm! That was some great stuff, lemme tell you.”

“You’re shitting me,” Tess snorted, her head resting against him. “I didn’t just get off the boat, Joel. Jalapeno is _not_ a jelly.”

“It is in Texas, darlin’,” Joel drawled, squeezing her affectionately. She let him. It felt so good to be close to him again.

“Nope,” she persisted with sweet defiance. “Strawberry is a jelly. Grape is a jelly. Raspberry. Apple. Even blackberry, if you’re hard up enough, I guess. But jalapeno is a _pepper_. Peppers are not jelly, Joel.”

“In Texas they are. Hell, we made jelly out of cactus down in Texas, girl,” Joel said with that weird pride Texans seemed to take in all the strange, unexpected ways they had of doing even the simplest things. As he was fond of telling her, Texas was different from the parts of America that had the misfortune of not being Texas – the less important parts that wished they were Texas, no doubt.

“Bullshit,” Tess snickered, skeptical, but nuzzling her cheek against his shirt. Clean flannel. He still smelled slightly of the smoky interior of Ned’s bar. “Pull the other one, Joel.”

He laughed softly, a deep, enticing rumble in his chest that passed through her body in delightful waves as she rested against his side. It made her smile. It made her breasts tingle too, which made her smile even more. She wanted to feel his whiskers, stiff and prickly, on her nipples tonight. She squeezed her thighs together discreetly. Her body was remembering how much it missed him.

She had been testing the waters since they entered Ned’s earlier in the evening. Joel seemed safe enough tonight. Not too ornery, as he liked to say. The anniversary of his daughter’s death was almost here. That always brought foul moods and bad dreams – worse than usual, anyway. She had long ago realized that this man tried to live his life entirely in the present, as through he had no past to burden him, but Tess knew better. The broken watch. The nightmares. The way he always buttoned up emotionally around the end of September. He rarely spoke of Sarah, but the dead girl was never far from his mind.

“I do miss my granny’s home cookin’, that’s for sure,” he smiled, his voice wistful.

Joel could pretend he had no past, that he had just arrived in Boston, stepping into her office as though out of thin air. But she knew better.

On the stereo, ‘I Need You Tonight’ began to play. Tess stirred a little. The song was slow, sexy, languorous. The kind of music that made a body want to fuck. They sat and listened to the song for a while, until the silence was thick enough to blanket them snugly.

“So,” she said simply.

“So,” he replied.

“Attention,” the PA system outside the window announced, “Curfew is now in full effect. Anyone caught outside without the proper authorization will be arrested and prosecuted.”

Tess leaned in, looking up at him with a challenging smile. “Time’s up, big guy. Looks like you’re trapped here with me tonight.”

“It does seem that way, don’t it?” There was a twinkle in his eye. “At least we got ice for the drinks, huh?”

“Mmm. Got the hot water heater fixed too,” Tess teased.

“Yeah? That does sound invitin’.”

“Mmm-hmm,” she purred. “Starting to cool off at night. Feels good to be warm… and clean.”

Her hand worked its way down the front of his shirt, nimble, slender fingers deftly working buttons loose along the way.

“Stayin’ warm is important. That’s a fact,” Joel murmured. “And this bourbon is certainly doin’ a good job of that.”

“I can do a better job,” Tess whispered.

“That so?” he husked.

Without a word, Tess slid off the couch, graceful as a cat. She pushed his knees apart and skillfully undid his belt buckle and worked his fly open. She eased him out, finding him already half hard, half ready for her.

“Not that I’m of a mind to talk you out of what you’re about to do,” he said, sipping from his drink, smiling crookedly, laying on the reckless charm in thick dollops. “But what brought this on?”

Tess worked him with her hands, a coy but triumphant curl to the corner of her lips. He had become hard very quickly. He could play it cool all he wanted, but his body didn’t lie. He wanted her.

“You don’t remember, Texas?” she countered impishly, never looking up, her eyes on her work.

“Remember…” he said slowly, making a big show of flipping through the pages of the non-existent mental calendar he never bothered to keep.

“What _day_ it is, you ass,” she snarked, pretending to be more put out by his behavior than she actually was.

Her tongue slid out and slowly traced the length of him, starting at the bottom. When she finally reached the tip, his breath caught in his throat for a tragically all too brief moment. She smiled, taking joy in the reaction she had produced.

“Th-Thursday,” he said, trying not to stammer as slick, wet lips brushed against the most sensitive part of him.

“Wednesday,” she corrected with a breathy giggle, her thumb massaging the shiny, swollen head of his hard shaft in small, tight circles. “And why is this Wednesday important? Hmm? Let me give you a minute to think on it.”

And with that, she took him into her mouth.

For the next minute or so, Joel knew he should think of something to say, try to figure out what this woman wanted to hear, but he couldn’t concentrate on anything except what she was doing to him. Before he knew it, time was up. She eased him out of her mouth, her lips clinging to him until the last second, until he slipped away with a wet slurping sound.

She smiled up at him. Her hands continued to stroke him as she spoke.

“Figure it out yet, Tex?”

Joel finished his drink quickly and tried to stall with a devilish grin.

“Could you give me another couple of minutes to think about it, darlin’?”

“You ass!’ she laughed and swatted his cock lightly with the back of her fingers. It stung, but in a good way. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

“Well…” he said, setting his empty glass down on the end table by the armrest of the sofa, his eyes smiling at her. “Must be something particularly good I’ve done… Cause you’re never _this_ nice to me for no reason.”

“You cocky S.O.B. I’m _always_ nice to you! When you _let_ me be,” she groused, annoyed but still turned on. She glided one fingertip up and down him.

Joel could think of a good half-dozen times in recent memory in which she had been the one to spurn his advances, but he decided to keep this information to himself and let it slide. Sometimes a man just had to know when he had a winning hand and not press his luck.

“All right,” he conceded with a shrug of his broad shoulders. “I give up. What’s so special about today?”

“I knew it!” she said, squeezing him tightly for emphasis. “God! You men are all alike. You can’t remember important dates for shit.”

“Hey now,” Joel mumbled, wanting to shift about a little but unable to, being well in hand, so to speak. “You’re the one who keeps the calendar, boss. I don’t even own one of those things.”

“Hmpf.”

That wasn’t even a word. Not a good sign. Joel cleared his throat and tried a new angle.

“C’mon, Tess. I’m rackin’ my brain here. Can you give me a hint?”

She shook her head. She never released him from her grip. She might have been disappointed. More likely, she was feigning it to make him squirm a bit.

“I swear, Joel Miller. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.” With her fingernail, she traced a small oval on the sensitive spot beneath the head of his cock.

“I can think of few things you might try, Theresa” Joel murmured in his best, sexy rumble.

“Ha! I bet you can! And don’t call me ‘Theresa’, you jackass.”

Only her dad and her beloved uncle had called her that. They had both been dead for years. That name had died with them. Not that Joel knew any of this. He’d seen her various ID cards, all forged of course, but most bearing her real name. He teased her about it every now and then. She never told him the truth about why she went by a nickname. It wasn’t any of his business, true, but she wanted him to know. And she wanted to keep it to herself. She wanted to keep him at arm’s length. She wanted to let him in. She wanted all these things, sometimes at the same time. Joel complicated everything about her life and she knew she should show him the door. She should have done it the moment he walked in the door of her office years before. She should have done it after the first night they’d slept together. She should have done it after their first big fight.

But she never did.

She always kept him around.

No matter how much he pissed her off, or made her crazy, or made her laugh, or rode her so hard she had to soak in a tub after, her pussy sore and her heart soaring.

She always kept him around.

She tried not to think about what that meant.

She pulled at his balls instead, making him groan and bringing a smile to her face.

She took them in one hand, folding her fingers above them, holding them snugly in the palm of her hand, and pulling them away from his body gently but firmly. He shuddered. She raised the flat of her other hand to swat them.

“You’re such an ass,” she taunted with a wicked grin. “I let you get away with too much, I think.”

“E-easy now, Tess,” he grunted. “Just kiddin’ with you, girl. Settle down, now.”

She let her hand hover for a moment. For as long as she dared. Another second or two and he was sure to get angry and that would ruin this evening. She wanted to tease him, not start a fight.

“I swear…” she said, doing her best to sound stern but she couldn’t maintain the ruse. She laughed instead. “One of these days, I’m really going to smack these, you know.”

“Not as funny on this end, girl,” he muttered.

“Big baby,” she giggled. “Just because _one time_ I said I was going to cut these off and mount them on my wall, you still gotta cry about it.”

“You’ve said it more than one time,” he groused. “You’ve been sayin’ it on and off for three damn year-“

He straightened up suddenly, or as much as a man could when a small hand around his testicles is holding him in place.

“Ah hell!” he exclaimed, realization arriving in a rush. “ _That’s_ what this is about!”

She sighed happily, pleased that he had finally put all the pieces together. She did not let him go.

“Jesus,” he chuckled. “It’s been _three years_ , hasn’t it?”

“Time flies. I like to keep you busy,” Tess giggled. “Don’t want you… wandering off…”

She kissed the tip of his cock, wrapping her free hand around his throbbing shaft.

“… with some underage girl…” she whispered.

“Ah hell, are we gonna fight about this again?” he grumped.

“Depends,” she said, applying a little more pressure to his balls while licking the shaft. “Do we need to talk about this again?”

“I already told you, Tess,” Joel sighed, exasperated but craving release. “Nothing happened with her. I was just talkin’ to her when you wandered over. And she ain’t underage. She’s almost twenty.”

“Yeah, sure. And I’m pushing sixty. And I know flirting when I see it,” Tess said. She turned her head to the side and tugged at the skin of the underside with her teeth.

Joel hissed. His balls were throbbing. Precum appeared at the end of his shaft, a small drop, glistening in the light of the late evening sun streaming in through the window.

“Jesus, Tess.”

“I gotta protect my investment, Joel. I put a lot of time and effort into you,” she cooed, stroking him in a way that was half protective and half angry. “Don’t want you running off with some kid half my age… er, your age, I meant.”

Ah, thought Joel, now we’re getting to the bottom of this.

“Theresa,” he began smoothly (she squeezed his balls as a warning – her mouth was full or else she might have said something), his fingers stroking her cheek tenderly as she looked up at him, never breaking eye contact. “You know me better than that, girl.”

She wanted to be mad at him, but she secretly liked it when he called her ‘girl’, but only when they were alone.

“You’re the only one I trust in this whole fucked up world, Tess. You know that.”

His voice was deep, reassuring. It bothered her that she loved it when he spoke to her in that tone. Reassuringly. Lovingly. Fatherly. It reached some secret part of her she didn’t like to admit existed. She could feel herself relaxing as he spoke to her in those smooth, confident tones. It was like a magic spell he could cast on her when he chose to. She resented it, but needed it so much some days. She swirled her tongue around the cock in her mouth in gratitude. Joel knew her. He got her. No one else in the world did. She wished she could tell him that she loved him. But that was a step too far. A door that could never be closed if she made the mistake of opening it. She stroked his shaft with her hand as she sucked, giving him even more stimulation. It wasn’t the same as a confession of love, but it would have to do. His balls grew heavy and large in her other hand. She thought about slipping a finger in his ass, but he almost never let her do that unless he had a lot more liquor in him than he had at the moment.

“That’s my girl,” he said, smoothing her unruly hair, his rough palm coming to rest on her cheek. He smiled as she moaned, sending fantastic vibrations through his aching cock. Her eyes were dark and full of devotion, staring deeply into his own. “That’s my girl.”

Tess closed her eyes and went to work. Joel settled back into the cushions. The fine, small hand holding his balls began to caress them, fondle them. He groaned. Her mouth was wet. Her tongue skillful. Slender, strong fingers worked his cock, pumping him, working him to climax. It wouldn’t be long. They hadn’t been together for a while. He had a lot of pent up lust that needed to be released. His fingers worked their way into her thick hair. He wanted to guide her, work her head up and down at a rhythm he dictated, but he knew Tess well enough to know that she didn’t care for that. Sonya didn’t seem to mind. But she wasn’t as skillful as Tess. The girl was only seventeen. She had a lot to learn. And he wouldn’t have strayed with the girl in the first damn place if Tess hadn’t dragged out this damn fight for a solid month. He was just a man, not a monk, and certainly not a saint. A week, sure. He could wait that long while she worked out the stuff in her head. Two weeks, even. He wasn’t a teenager that had to have it every day. But a month? That was craz-

“Jesus,” he grunted, almost climaxing, as cold air suddenly washed over his wet member.

Tess had let him go, and just when he was about to reach the finish line. He groaned. His engorged balls protested. His hard, gleaming cock twitched and jerked, vainly seeking out just a little more physical contact. That’s all it needed. Just a little more and he would be there.

“Fuck,” he groaned. “That’s just _mean_ , girl.”

Tess snickered, still kneeling in front in of him, settling back on her heels, a satisfied grin on her face. She rubbed his thighs with her hands.

He ran his fingers through his hair in frustration and shot her a look of frustration. She passed her unfinished drink up to him.

“After this, what say we take a long, hot shower?” she asked.

“After?” he muttered somewhat irritably.

She began to unbutton her shirt.

“After,” she said pointedly, slipping her shirt off, “you tell me what you and that girl got up to.”

“ _Nothing_ ,” he sighed. “I told you that already.”

“Uh huh,” she snorted, her eyes studying him as she wadded up her favorite shirt and tossed it onto the sofa seat next to him. She couldn’t be sure if he was lying or not. But she had her suspicions. You didn’t survive very long as a player in the Boston QZ underworld without having good instincts about people. She pulled her undershirt up, working it over her head.

“Tess,” Joel said, “I’m telling you. Nothin’ happened with that woman. I was just in Kate’s lookin’ to buy some ammo. She helps out Kate sometimes for some extra scratch. I was just killin’ time. Shootin’ the breeze, yeah?”

The undershirt landed with a quiet whisper next to the first shirt. Tess unhooked her bra, shaking her tits loose with a sexy shimmy of her shoulders. If Joel was about to say anything else, he forgot the words. His eyes were transfixed on her jiggling breasts. She smiled, the winner of this test of wills. She threw the black bra up at him, and it draped itself across one of his shoulders.

“I was aiming for your face,” she teased, dark eyes glittering.

Joel said nothing. He chuckled, but his eyes barely flicked away from the sight of her large breasts. He made eye contact with her briefly, but his gaze returned to her naked torso. She reached under the edge of the sofa, fingers seeking something she had hidden there earlier in the day, before he had dropped by to pick her up. Tess was a planner. She planned everything. It was why she was one of the top smugglers in a dangerous city.

Finding what she looked for, she slid it next to her knee, out of his line of sight. She squeezed her tits together for him, bouncing them lightly in her hands. She winked, confident and in control of the moment. He chuckled and sipped from her glass. She’d poured herself a double, and there was still plenty of bourbon left in the tumbler.

“What you got in mind, darlin’?” he asked, settling back, hoping against hope that she was done asking about Sonya for a while.

“Gonna do something that your flat-chested tramp can’t,” she snarked, making a face at him as he rolled his eyes. It was an immature thing to do, maybe, but she didn’t care.

He watched as she produced the plastic bottle seemingly out of thin air. The cap was pink and she flipped it open with a smooth flick of her thumb. She tilted the bottle and squirted a healthy amount of the clear fluid. A familiar smell filled the room.

“Is that… baby oil?” he asked.

“Yep,” she began to rub her gleaming hand across her breasts, working the fluid into her cleavage, making her tits slick and glossy. She squirted a little more into her hand and repeated the action. “You don’t even want to know how many ration cards I had to use to get this stuff. It’s reserved for mom’s and orphanages now, you know. Shortage. Shocking, right? A shortage in Boston.”

“What’s the world comin’ to?” Joel said, watching with rapt fascination as she greased up her tits. This was the rarest of treats.

Tess leaned in, pressed her breasts together, trapping his cock between them. She began to work them up and down, sliding him between her soft flesh slowly.

“Holy fuck, Tess,” he breathed.

“Shh, cowboy. I’ve been planning this night for two weeks. Don’t ruin it by talking now, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he chuckled.

She set a nice, slow pace, clearly in no hurry, letting him enjoy this for as long as he could.

“Goddamn, girl,” he groaned when he could hold the words back no longer. “ffffuucckk…”

“Mmm-hmmm,” she purred.

“Shhhhiiit,” he moaned. It wouldn’t be long now. It couldn’t be. There was no way he could hold it back. She was too good at this.

“Who knows,” she cooed. “Play your cards right and I might let you talk me into doing that other thing you’re always going on about.”

“You’re kiddin’.” Rising ecstasy mixed with disbelief.

“Nope. Tonight could be your lucky night,” she whispered, working him gently, coaxing him nearer and nearer to completion. “Plenty of baby oil. Just go slow, all right?”

“I will,” he groaned. “I’ll be real gentle.”

“You’d better be,” she said softly. “Cause if you hurt me, you’re never getting that again.”

No more words. A long minute filled with the quiet, whispering slickness of flesh on flesh.

“God, Tess,” he moaned. “I’m gonna…”

“I know,” she said in a voice so small it barely carried to his ears. “That’s why I’m doing this, Texas. Just let me know before it happens so I can get my mouth around it. I want to taste you, you know?”

“Fuck,” he grunted. “I’d like to see this side of you more often, girl.”

“And I’d like to see you stay the fuck away from Sonya. Deal?”

“Deal,” he hissed.

“Good. Now c’mon, Joel… come for me.”

“Jesus!”

Her lips were wrapped around him as it came rushing out of him in a scalding torrent.

 

* * *

 

Joel awoke in a panic, his body shaking with the release he was still experiencing. He gasped and tried to stifle a groan as his cock continued to spurt and gush inside his old sweat pants.

“f-fuck,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “fuck”

Nearby, Ellie lay sleeping soundly, curled up in his sleeping back. She didn’t stir as he quietly got to his feet, gathered his backpack and slipped outside.

**. . .**

Arlington, Wyoming was just a spot on the side of the road. The little gas station they were sleeping in had probably never seen much business. Probably just enough to get by month to month. It was out of the way enough that it had escaped the worst of the looting during the really bad days two decades ago.

“Too damn old to be havin’ wet dreams,” Joel grumbled to himself as he slid on his jeans. “Too damn old for any of this shit.”

He hoped Ellie wouldn’t ask why he had changed his pants in the middle of the night. She was sharp, that kid. She didn’t miss much. She would notice. Hopefully, she would let it slide without comment. He sighed in defeat as he zipped his fly up. Most likely, she wouldn’t. She lived on questions. They were like air to her.

Why the fuck is this happening to me, he wondered. Why won’t anything stay buried?

He looked up at the slice of moonlight peering through the clouds above.

That night was the last night they were together. The next day, they’d had a fight over something stupid. He couldn’t even remember what. And then she’d wanted time away from him for a while. And when she’d reached out again, it was the end of September. Sarah would have been thirty-two years old. He’d needed space, like he always did. And then Robert had double-crossed them. And then Marlene hired them to take the girl downtown. And then…

“Tess…” he sighed to the empty, quiet nighttime world. “There’s so many things I should’ve told you, girl.”

 

* * *

 

Morning. Shafts of late dawn daylight shone in through dirty, grimy windows. Ellie was packing to go. Joel was rinsing his chow kit over the drain set in the garage floor.

_Is he mad at me? He hasn’t said two words to me since I woke up._

“You know…” he began, his eyes on the water bottle in his hand. “Tess really liked you, Ellie.”

“What? I mean, she did?” Ellie was taken aback, completely unprepared for this.

“Sure.”

“How do you know? I mean, she seemed nice. Polite, I guess. Professional and stuff,” Ellie said, feeling her own way to the answer like she sometimes did. She smiled. “She treated me nicer than you did at first. No offense, but you were a grumpy gus.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, screwing the cap back on the bottle. “I did take awhile to warm up to you, I reckon.”

“Yes, you did,” she teased sweetly. “But I didn’t know she liked me. Are you sure?”

“Sure as I’m sittin’ here. She talked to you… Not something she usually did with the people we were movin’ from one place to another.”

“Cool,” Ellie grinned, beaming with pride. “I liked her too. She was a badass.”

“Short stuff, you don’t know the half of it. That woman was tough as nails,” he said, a hint of something like sadness in his voice. “And sweet as honey… when she wanted to be. Did you know she ran one of the most successful smuggling rings in Boston? Built it herself from the ground up when she was about twenty-six or so.”

“Really? That’s awesome!”

“Yeah. She was on the rise when she hired me. I really hitched my wagon to a star when I joined her crew.”

“You worked for her?” Ellie walked over to stand close to him as she shrugged her pack on. “I kinda thought you were partners. Together, you know?”

Joel stood up and began to work his own pack across his back. “Kiddo, Tess and I were… complicated. Let’s just leave it at that.”

“Okay,” she agreed quickly. “Don’t want to pry.”

He slung the Winchester from one shoulder and picked up the shotgun. His voice said he was a million miles away when he spoke again.

“She liked you. She didn’t like too many people. I think… maybe she saw some of herself in you. Tough. Brave. But sweet too. Yeah?”

“Aww,” she bubbled, nudging him in the ribs, trying not to blush. “Thanks, Joel.”

“Sure.” He rolled up the garage door and began to walk the Honda out into the daylight, the girl trotting along happily in his wake. “C’mon now. We gotta hit the road.”

Ellie let the words bounce around inside her head. Tough. Brave. Sweet. She buckled the helmet on, still grinning inside, behind the visor as she climbed up to take her place on the bike, settling in behind him.

Joel would not speak to her about Tess again until Wyoming was miles and miles behind them and spring had arrived in Utah. But the words he’d spoken today would stay with her for years to come.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so Tess leaves my story. She won’t appear again in the pages to follow. With only a few chapters left before the end, the focus needs to shift to Joel and Ellie as they complete their journey to Jackson. So like Riley a few chapters back, I have to say goodbye to Tess. She was a lot of fun to write. I’m going to miss her presence in this story.
> 
> For the continuity hounds, Sonya was mentioned very briefly in volume one, chapter eight. The way I see it, Joel and Tess weren’t exactly exclusive because they were never exactly a couple. I’m sure both of them strayed a bit here and there, mostly when they were fed up with the other. But in the end, they always came back together. Maybe in a world and a town like the one they had the misfortune of living in, a relationship like that was the best anybody could manage.
> 
> Also, jalapeno makes for a damn fine jelly.
> 
> Anyway, drop by next Saturday (hopefully) for chapter twenty-seven: Palabras.


	27. Palabras

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joel and Ellie break for lunch and then continue their journey along I-80, towards the North Platte River, on the last leg of their long trip to Jackson. A few more days and they’ll be at Tommy’s. Time is running out for them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who have been asking for more of Joel’s inner monologue, here you go.
> 
> Also, this update is a little late. Everyone should be used to that by now, regrettably. Just three more chapters to go, however. So it’s becoming less of a problem through attrition, I suppose.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 27 – Palabras**

 

Ellie was the first one on the bike after lunch. She scooped the keys of the ground by Joel’s boot while he was packing away the leftover ‘spammage’, the spam and sauerkraut mixture that had become a staple of their diet since they’d found so many cans of the two ingredients back in… where was it, exactly? That bunker with the dead woman in it? The pawnshop turned shelter with the old, charred clicker in the parking lot? Someplace else? Where had the spam and the sauerkraut come from?

He was trying to remember that detail which, like so many other details, had become fuzzy while on the road, when Ellie suddenly scrambled to her feet and made a break for the red motorcycle, laughing maniacally.

She sprinted across the blacktop to Honda, parked in the shadow of the old Wal-Mart eighteen-wheeler, laughing daringly, victoriously, as she ran. The keys jangled in her grip, her arms swinging as she dashed to her prize. She had wanted to do this for ages and she had finally worked up the nerve to promote herself to helmsman of this starship. She could feel her cheeks pushing up into her eyes from the wild expanse of her smile. Her heart raced and her love for him made her feel like she could leap into the air and fly.

“Front seat!” she whooped joyously. “Callin’ it now, dude! Front seat!”

“Ellie,” Joel exhaled grumpily. The roads hadn’t been great today, all cracked and busted from too many harsh winters and too many hot summers. They weren’t making great time today, barely forty miles since breakfast, and he wasn’t in the mood for her teenage antics.

She placed her hands on the gas tank, threw one leg over the front seat of the bike, and began to lever herself up with a soft grunt. The bike was too big for her. Only the tips of her toes would be able to reach the ground once she was settled into place. She wiggled her bottom, working her way onto the front seat.

“Goddammit,” Joel muttered to the midday air.

Her shapely, firm ass looked great in the snug blue denim of her jeans, and he wasn’t in to mood for his middle-aged lust either.

Girl that young ought not have hips like those, he mused to himself.

“C’mon! I’m driving!” she laughed, small hands on the ends of the yoke, pretending to rev the engine, making the appropriate sounds with her plump mouth. The girl was filled to overflowing with life and not half as aware as she should be about how sexy she was to him.

She ought to be, he thought. If she had any sense, she’d at least be wearing a damn bra. Hard not to think the wrong things when she pulls shit like this and walks around all day looking like that. Looking older than she is. Looking too damn much like a woman.

The day was warm. Her three-color windbreaker was stuffed in her backpack. The Steve Miller Band shirt she had put on the morning was in there too, all wadded up with the jacket. She’d said it was too hot for that many layers. She was right. It was unusually nice today, almost summery, not what anybody would expect from Wyoming in mid-October. Probably the last gasps of warm weather they would get before the serious chills of the late year arrived.

Fuck, why couldn’t that girl’ve worn a bra today, he fumed silently, zipping his pack up, forcing his guilty eyes to watch his hands instead of the pleasantly peaked shapes of her breasts, so tantalizingly snug and inviting inside her white thermal shirt.

Damn thing hugs her like a second skin, he thought, frowning. Clingy. Fucking sexy. Damn it, Ellie. You’ve got bras. A bunch of them. Wear one, why don’t you? Jesus.

He crossed the distance from where they’d eaten lunch by the front tire of the old semi truck to the Honda waiting near the end of the trailer, the inside of which had been cleaned out years ago – they’d looked. First thing they’d done when they pulled to a stop. The bones of this world were almost picked clean.

She smiled as he approached, trying to look at him in ways she probably shouldn’t, trying to hide how her eyes slid along him, lingering here, lingering there, always trying to be subtle about it, but never pulling it off. She liked looking at him, at his arms, at his chest, his shoulders, and all sorts of other places, but she wasn’t experienced enough to be discreet about the way she did it. She was reasonably sure he didn’t notice. He did his best to pretend she was getting away with it. His cock stirred inside his pants, staying soft as he walked, but threatening to burst into life every time her lovely green eyes settled onto the bulge of it, which was often.

She sure loves looking at my johnson, he thought, and regretted it instantly.

The realization made him half hard as he strode the last few steps to the Honda. At such close range, she noticed. He was sure of it. She blushed and looked away, only to look back quickly, enjoying the shape of him inside his Levis.

Her fingers curled around the thick rubber of the handlebars and Joel couldn’t help but notice how phallic the controls seemed in her hands. Images of those fingers around his hard cock danced through his mind and he studied the dirt under his fingernails instead.

“Vroom!” she grinned, looking up at him, beautiful and young and tempting. Delightful. Happy. In love. “We’re gonna make good time now with me up front. You’ll see. You drive like such an old lady, Joel.”

“Hush up and scoot on back,” he said, standing alongside the Honda, reaching for the yoke, his left hand covering hers and the clutch controls she was playing with. Her hand was small, practically engulfed by his.

“Aww! C’mon! Let me drive! I called it! You heard me!” Her eyes sparkled. Her cheeks turned a deeper shade of rosy pink. Her white teeth shone in the sun. She wanted to turn her hand over, to slip her fingers between his. She wanted to hold his hand. She didn’t, but oh how she wanted to. Her red helmet was hanging from the other handlebar. She suddenly wanted to put it on to hide her face. She was blushing so hard it was embarrassing.

“Ellie,” he cautioned. He needed to sit down and soon, before his willpower ran out and the sight of her tits rising and falling with each breath inside that tight white thermal top made him erect. She was turned at the waist as she faced him to use her words, to plead her case, pulling the shirt tight across her belly and chest. Her jutting nipples were hard. Her gorgeous little breasts were practically on display for him. The fingers of his free hand twitched. He wanted to feel those beautiful, soft forms pressed against his palms. He wanted to touch them, stroke them, like he had in the lakeside cabin a week ago. He remembered the sounds she made. Soft sighs, like the coo of a bird, responding to his caresses. Then groans, sensual and deep as he massaged them, working her into a higher state of arousal. Then grunts and gasps, when the teasing had turned to torment, drawing cries of pleasure-pain from her young body. Ellie liked it rough, as it turned out. Had she know this about herself before? Or had he shown her this side of herself for the first time? Either way, the girl had responded to the escalating abuse with enthusiastic approval. She’d almost come from it, he was sure of it. He wanted to touch her body again, but he was afraid of how far it might go… of how far she might want it to go. She was too young. He was too old. She was looking down, like she was trying to think of something to say, some words to convince him, using words to steer him to her way of thinking, like she sometimes did. But she had lost her train of thought. She was staring at the front of his jeans again. He was hard as a rock. She was blushing. And smiling. Her nipples were erect, pushing against the front of her shirt rhythmically as her chest worked air into her lungs quickly. She was breathing very fast. She was turned on, just like him. She wanted to fuck, just like him. He wanted to lift her off the bike, carry her over to the tall grass at the edge of the highway, and screw this beautiful little virgin’s brains out until neither one of them could remember their own names. He wanted to be her first. He wanted to fuck her so perfectly that he would ruin her for other men, setting a standard that nobody else would ever be able to meet. He wanted to take that sweet little pussy with its thick red curls and tender plump lips and make it his for all time. He wanted to hear her cry his name while she came. He wanted to thrust and thrust and thrust until all his come came exploding out. So much of it that it would squirt out of her as she fucked her, gushing out with each thrust, spraying out, hot and wet, like her pussy, even as he continued to pump hard and fast into her tight little cunt. He wanted to fill her up with their combined juices until she overflowed from it, like a dam bursting from the strain. He wanted Ellie. He wanted Ellie so bad he knew he was going to hell. She was just a kid but he didn’t care anymore. He was going to fuck this girl. He knew it. She knew it too. Her eyes were fixed on his throbbing cock. The tip of her pink tongue darted across her full lips. They glistened and he imagined slipping into her mouth, feeling those full lips wrap around him, that pink tongue wet and slick on the underside of his cock, that cute, soft jaw line, that adorable little chin, opening up, distending, making room for him in the wet, warm confines of her mouth. He was going to spray a hot load of cum inside that sweet little mouth, and damn soon. Her right hand slipped over to rest on his hand, the one that was covering her left hand. His hips tilted forward almost imperceptibly, unconsciously showing more of himself to her. Her hands trembled. She squeezed his fingers with hers. She held her breath. Her pupils widened. They were going to fuck. She knew it now, just as he did. He heard his own voice and barely recognized it. “Scoot on back, Red.”

“Please?” she squeaked out, trying not to stare at the long, hard thing in his pants. Her pussy was tingling, growing warmer by the second. The cool, hard gas tank between her thighs felt so good pressed against her yearning mound. She wanted to grind herself against it. She wanted to have him inside her. She wanted to come. She wanted to make him come. Her clothes were too tight, too warm. They had to come off. His too. They needed to be naked, both of them. It made so much sense. It was the best idea she’d ever had. The best idea in a life filled with good ideas. They needed to fuck. She needed to tell him that. She needed him to know. She needed him. Her mouth was dry. She wanted to kiss him. To suck him. She wanted to hold his balls in her hand. She wanted his tongue on her hard clit, licking her in that crazy awesome way, making her melt, just like Riley had done. She wanted to come so fucking bad it was driving her insane. “Please, Joel?”

Their eyes met. He couldn’t be sure what she was asking for. It could be one thing. Or it might be another. It was probably both. Her hand squeezed his insistently. It was both.

“Please let me… I want to…” she whispered.

“Ellie…”

“Please. I’ve _never_ done this before. I want to try it. Just once? Okay?”

He swallowed hard. His eyes were guarded. Hers were expressive, baring her soul to him. They shimmered with lust, the fire burning her up from inside plain to see in the light of the warm sun.

Ever see a woman who wanted it so damn bad?

She ain’t a woman.

She’s enough of one. And she’s horny as all hell. Just look at her! She’d suck me in a second if you’d ask her to. So ask already!

I’m seeing something that’s not there, he told himself. She’s only talking about the bike. That’s all this is.

Look at those big lips on that little face! Sweet baby Jesus! This girl was born to suck cock!

It’s just the bike.

She’d drop to her knees right now if you asked her to. She’ll do anything to please you! Tell her to start sucking and see what happens! You’ll see I’m right! And you’ll get a blowjob. You’ll be happy. She’ll be happy! Everybody wins!

“Ellie…” he said in a faint, husky voice.

“C’mon. I’m ready,” she cooed, grinning slyly, clearly aware of the double meaning of her words. He was so big and hard. Her pussy ached. She needed him so, so badly. Why were they still wearing clothes? Fuck clothes. Clothes were stupid. She wanted his arms, big and bare, around her, holding her close, so close, naked and close and… “Teach me what to do, Joel. _Teach me_. Pretty please?”

She’s talking about the bike. Just the bike, he told his cock. We ain’t fucking this girl. Get that idea out of your head, you sick fucker.

She wants to, his cock whispered. She let you see her naked at the creek. Remember that sweet little snatch with the red trim? That round ass? She wanted you to see it! She practically dry humped you in that chair. Remember those sweet titties? Remember the sounds she made? She wants to _fuck_. She wants to fuck _you_. You _know_ she does.

I know, he thought, looking to the heavens, looking for some kind of help. I know.

He exhaled loudly. The clouds drifted lazily overhead. No shaft of light appeared. No angels. No voice from on high. He was on his own, just like always.

“Okay?” she said softly, her voice hinting at the looming victory. She patted his hand affectionately, somewhat sympathetically. After so many weeks on the road together, she knew that look on his face. Joel was about to give in and let her have her way.

Joel said nothing. He couldn’t remember why he didn’t want her up front. Something about her being safer on the backseat… but from what? Hunters? Wrecks? Sick old men who couldn’t be trusted to keep their hands to themselves? There was a fog in his head. His thoughts were murky. His cock ached. He wondered if her pussy was ready for him. He suspected he knew the answer. She grinned impishly, her nipples straining against the thermal fabric, and nibbled at her bottom lip with her teeth. She was dying to play with her tits, just a little, though he had no way of knowing that. She gripped the throttle tightly with one hand, and held tightly to the back of his hand with the other. Anything to keep her hands away from her needy body. She steadied her voice when she spoke, but the excitement that laced each word was easy enough to hear.

“I promise I won’t be in the way. I just want to see the view from up here, that’s all. Okay? You can drive. I don’t even know how to work this thing. There’s so many damn buttons. And switches. Levers. You know what they do. I’ll just sit up here and watch. Okay?”

His hand slipped from between hers. His other hand came up. He placed them on her shoulders. She started to protest. She didn’t want to be moved, to be picked up like a little kid. But her body pulsed with the thought of the strength in his big arms. She imagined how light she would feel when he lifted her off the seat.

Instead, he began to slip the backpack off, working it from her shoulders by the straps. She gasped. It was almost at though he was undressing her. Her arms went to her sides, elbows tucked in, making room for him to slide the nylon pack from her body. She arched her back, pushing her breasts out. She wanted to cup her own breasts so much she made her hands ball into fists so they’d mind their own business and behave themselves.

“Let’s just get this off first,” he said.

“Okay,” she peeped, a lustful, strained sound. “Good idea.”

She shuddered faintly, her eyes closed. She couldn’t stop grinning. Her heart was pounding. She was sure he could hear it.

“Don’t want your shrunken head pokin’ me in the gut the whole way,” he chuckled as he worked one of the straps out, making the loop as big as he could before he hung her pack from the back of the motorcycle, just above where the long guns rested, suspended by their leather slings. The purple plastic cyclops head hanging on the back dangled from its short loop. Goofy white fangs. Cat ears. Joel had no idea what this thing was supposed to be. But Ellie had obviously liked it enough to decorate her pack with it. Ellie had strange tastes. Unique, that was probably the word she’d use. Or a larger, fancier word, more likely. Ellie loved words as much as she loved weird things like this strange little head.

”Shrunken head?” she giggled, swiveling around to face him. The gas tank ground against her pussy as she did and her breath squeaked out in a sensual way that made Joel’s throat tighten. She poked his bicep with one slim finger. “Don’t talk about Teagan like that. She’s sensitive about her condition.”

“Teagan?”

“The purple head. She’s got a rare condition that left her without a body but she’s still a good person,” she babbled playfully, making it up as she went. “You don’t have to have a body to be nice people, Joel. Jeez.”

“Teagan,” he repeated flatly. This girl marched to her own beat, that was for sure.

“It’s Irish,” Ellie giggled. “It means ‘pretty’, I think.”

“Uh-huh,” Joel said, throwing his leg over the seat of the bike, straddling it, easing himself into place behind her. He felt the warmth of her body. His cock said nothing. It didn’t have to. He was thinking the same thing that it was.

“You’d have to ask Tegan,” Ellie said, her voice high, nervous, as she felt him so close at her back. She settled against him cautiously, wondering if he felt the same electric thrill as she did. “She speaks Irish. I don’t.”

“Teagan,” Joel said a third time. Of all the names a kid could give a toy. And any kid with toys was too young to do the sort of stuff he was thinking about doing with her. “You get that from one of your comic books?”

“Romance novel,” Ellie said, stiffening as his arms came around either side of her to take the controls of the bike. It was so wonderfully close to an embrace. A ripple of heat flowed through her body.

“You read romance novels?” he asked, his voice deep and rumbly and right next to her ear.

“My roommate read them,” Ellie said, her voice squeakier than usual. “I made fun of her for it… but when she wasn’t around, I sorta read them too. The dirty parts, anyway.”

He chuckled. “Let me guess: Teagan put you up to it.”

“She’s a bad influence,” Ellie giggled, playing along happily. “And I give in to peer pressure super easy.”

He laughed and pushed the ignition button. The engine revved into life. His fingers sought the lever of the clutch, mounted on the left handlebar, but Ellie slid her hand in under his, grabbing the rubber handle.

“Let me do it,” she said.

“I’ll work the clutch, thanks,” Joel said, settling his hand in over hers.

She tried to shoo his hand away with her free hand. She did not let go of the handlebar.

“I can do it. Promise. I know what to do,” she insisted.

“That a fact?” he asked. The fingers of her right hand were tight around his, but he didn’t let her push his hand away.

“It is,” she said, trying to look back at him over her shoulder. “I’ve watched you shift gears a zillion times. I don’t what goes on with this stuff,” and here she indicated the GPS screen, the radio, the various gauges, and all the other controls clustered inside the center console,” but I can see the handles just fine and I’ve seen what you do.”

Joel considered this for a minute. The silence made her uncomfortable, even more than it usually did. She rushed to drive it away.

“What? It’s not like there’s a bunch to do back there,” she continued, speaking quickly. “So I watch… your hands… when they’re doing… stuff… um… No biggie. I mean… I watch what you do up here… You know?”

Her voice faded away. She had said too much. She was scared he’d ask questions

She liked watching his hands do things. All sorts of things. Cleaning guns. Cooking dinner. Moving chess pieces. Anything, really. She just liked his hands. She liked how big and strong they were. How rough they felt… on her skin… her back… her breasts… She loved his hands.

“Alright,” he groused, thinking about parts of her other than her hands. “But you mess this up and strip the transmission out…”

“I won’t! You’ll see!” Excited, she bounced slightly in place, at the junction between the cushion of the seat and the seam of the gas tank. “I’ll be your co-pilot. I’ll be awesome, of course.”

He chuckled. “Make sure that shotgun’s in there good and snug.”

She had laid her cut-down shotgun across the front of the console when she’d climbed up here. It rested between the front edge of the controls and the inside of the windscreen, above the stereo speakers. She reached down to adjust it, leaning forward at the waist. Joel had the sudden urge to grab her around the waist and ease his throbbing cock inside her, taking her from behind.

Convinced that the gun wasn’t going anywhere, Ellie sat back, scooting towards him just a little, trying to get at least some of her poor, tormented pussy away from the hard surface of the gas tank. The vibrations of the engine were pulsing through the surface and passing straight into her desperate sex. A few miles of that and she would cream her jeans. She was sure of it. It’s not that she didn’t want to come, she just didn’t want to do it in front of him. How would she explain the -

The crack of her denim-wrapped ass pressed against his hard cock.

She gasped.

He may have too.

“Oh _man_ ,” she whispered.

“Maybe you oughta scoot up just a bit, girl,” he grunted into her ear.

“D-do I have to?” she squeaked.

No words were spoken. Just the idling of the engine to fill the air.

“No,” he mumbled. “You can stay right where you are if you like.”

“Good,” she breathed in a tiny voice. “Cool.”

More silence. On the left handlebar, his hand rested atop hers. She pressed her ass against him a little more. The little denim valley of her butt was warm and inviting against his erect cock. She pressed against it a little more. She moaned a little and wondered if he could hear the sound over the idling engine. She bit her lower lip. She was embarrassed and horny and wanted to giggle or run away or turn around and kiss him or fuck him or something anything she didn’t know what but she wanted to let him know what she was feeling even if she didn’t know exactly herself but she knew she wasn’t breathing and tried to get some air in through a throat almost clenched shut with something that wasn’t fear and wasn’t an orgasm but was still somehow a few shades of both at once.

“This is… wow,” she said. “That feels nice, I mean… Really good… Wow…”

“Yeah,” he muttered, knowing he should tell her to climb down and get on the back right now. Right fucking now before this opened the door to something else tonight. If he cared for this girl at all, he had to tell her to move right now. To get her ass away from his cock right now. She was too young to know better. He was too old to do this to her. She was a good girl and he had to look after her. If he cared for her at all, he had to tell her to get on the back of the bike and stay there. And stay away from him later tonight, in camp. And wear a goddamn bra, for fucks sake. He had to tell her, for her own good. She needed to be protected from him. From his desires.

“Ellie…”

Tell her to move. Tell her to fucking get on the back. Tell her right now.

“Yeah?” So soft. So nervous. So trusting.

Tell her to move, you sick son of a bitch. Do the right fucking thing for a change.

“Squeeze the clutch, girl. I’m gonna shift ‘er into first.”

“Okay.” Giddy. Scared and excited and ready to rush headlong into anything with him.

Her slender fingers closed around the silver lever of the clutch and pulled it towards the yoke. His boot levered the bike into gear. He squeezed the small hand beneath his and she let the clutch out smoothly. They rolled onto the highway. His hard cock remained pressed into the hollow of her ass. Her pussy devoured every delicious vibration the Honda sent her way. She wanted to come. After a few miles, she did.

 

* * *

 

“… oh man…” she wheezed under her breath, trying to be discrete as the last flames of the climax flickered through her. She hoped the helmet she was wearing muffled her words enough so that they wouldn’t carry to his ears. “… oh god…”

He was still hard. He had been hard the whole way, pressed against her in a way that made it very difficult for her to think. How had he not come yet? Didn’t guys feel vibrations too? Was he just that much in control of himself? She wondered if he could fuck all night. She’d heard Cherry Jackson say that about a guy once. She said he was only real stud she’d ever met. A cock master. Ellie giggled to herself and groaned, her greedy pussy craving even more contact with the gas tank and those wonderful tremors.

“You okay, Ellie?” Joel asked and she realized she was slumped forward.

“N-no,” she said in as normal a voice as she could manage. “I’m f-fine. Just… enjoying the ride…th-that’s all.”

She leaned back against him and sighed happily. Her hand was still on the clutch. His hand had been covering hers as a safety precaution. Now he took that hand away and placed it on her belly. Her stomach went rigid for a moment. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t expecting the contact. She grinned and stretched out against his chest, arching her back. Her nipples pointed the way down the road.

“That ol’ engine must feel mighty nice, I reckon,” he said huskily in her ear.

She tensed, busted and embarrassed.

“Umm…” she began and then burst into a fit of giggles.

He held her close, butterflies dancing beneath his firm hand, while she laughed herself out.

“Fuck! You knew?” she said, flipping up her visor, trying to look back at him.

“The way your body was shakin’… the sounds you were makin’ the last mile or so? Hard to miss.”

“Damn it!” she groused cutely. “I gotta learn how to be quieter about stuff like that.”

“Hell, I hope you don’t!” he barked, hugging her tightly. “Fine way to pass the time, if you ask me, listenin’ to you enjoyin’ yourself like that.”

“Yeah? Mmmm,” she purred then giggled shyly. She was trying so hard to be cool. “Well… it was still kind of embarrassing. I’m pretty dorky, huh?”

“You’re pretty,” he said, his finger rubbing her belly in a way that made her toes clench at her socks. She pushed her feet down on the tops of his boots and groaned. He smiled, reading her body language clearly. “I know that for a fact, girl.”

“Yeah? Really?” she said timidly, biting her lip, blushing hard, smiling wildly inside the helmet.

“Yeah,” he said with smooth certainty.

She placed her free hand over his, wanting to feel him holding her. “No guy’s ever called me that before.”

“Have a hard time believin’ that,” he said, feeling her fingers exploring the spaces between his.

“It’s the truth,” she said honestly. “No guy has ever told me I’m pretty.”

“That’s weird,” he said, doing his best to sound puzzled. “I didn’t know the military prep school took in blind students.”

She cackled. Joel joked so rarely and he had wrapped a compliment up in that one. She loved him for it. She wanted him to say it again.

“A guy called me sexy once,” she said suddenly, the words slipping out. “His name was Kevin. He drilled a hole in the wall of the girl’s shower and watched me while I was getting all naked and soapy. I saw him on the parade ground and he called me sexy. By then, I knew he was one of the boys who’d drilled the hole. The next day, I kicked him in the balls outside the cafeteria.”

“Ha! Good for you. He had that comin’, Red.”

She giggled and wiggled against him, feeling the broad expanse of his chest against her shoulder blades and the hard shape of his cock against her butt. His thighs were on either side of her hips. She loved being so close to him in such an intimate way. She wondered why she hadn’t made the choice to ride up front before now.

“Thanks,” she said.

“He was right, though,” Joel said into the side of her helmet. “You are a sexy little thing, girl.”

She blushed, giggled, and couldn’t think of a single thing to say. She tucked her chin against her throat instead and wanted to be invisible for just a minute. Joel had never said these kinds of things to her before and now it was coming at her all at once. She felt beautiful. She felt dorky. She wanted to cry for no reason she could understand.

His hand felt so good on her stomach. She reached down and tugged her thermal shirt up, pulling it loose from the waistband of her jeans so that he could touch her bare skin.

“Careful, girl,” he growled in her ear, his callused hand caressing the soft flesh of her exposed stomach. “You better watch yourself or the next time we find a Motel 6, I might drill a hole in the shower wall.”

She cackled and leaned back against him.

“I might let you,” she laughed.

 

* * *

 

Ellie groaned loudly. She didn’t stifle it and probably couldn’t have if she’d wanted to.

“Clutch,” Joel said.

“Wha?” she said. His hand was kneading one of her breasts, inside her shirt. The wonderful gas tank was sending ripple after ripple of the engine’s vibrations into her swollen mound, pressed firmly against the surface of the fiberglass and metal shell in a way that almost formed an airtight seal. She had come twice in the last half hour. She was about to come again. “Huh?”

“Bad road ahead. Gotta downshift. Clutch for me.”

“‘Kay,” she moaned.

Her fingers fumbled with the lever, pulling it. Pulling it like he was pulling her tender nipple. He tugged at it with his thumb and forefinger. She groaned and pushed back against him.

“Oh God… Joel…”

He worked the gearshift, bringing the bike down into second gear, goosing the throttle just a little make the transition a smooth one. The bike shimmied a bit as he did. The girl gasped and pushed her hips forward, shoving her cunt hard against the fuel tank, trying to press herself as close to the source of the vibrations as she could manage. Joel smiled despite himself. A few hours of this, and when they made camp tonight, she’d hardly require any foreplay at all.

“Let it out,” he said warmly.

“I am,” she panted. “Oh God, I am.”

“The clutch,” he chided.

“Oh. Right.” She giggle-panted and released the lever. The bike shuddered and she squeezed her thighs against the sides of the bike. “Mmm!”

This girl is getting one hell of a good fucking tonight, he mused to himself as she went stiff against him, right on the edge.

“…goddddddd…” she wheezed, shuddering, coming again.

He pinched her nipple hard to add to the intensity of her climax. Too hard?

“GOD!” she gasped.

He smiled.

Just hard enough. He twisted it a little and she wailed softly, her orgasm prolonged, her love for him coursing through her trembling body.

 

* * *

 

First gear wasn’t much fun. Not enough RPMs to produce the right kind of vibrations. She was still horny, but the road had turned bad again. She rested against him, and prayed for solid blacktop to return soon.

“You can play with my boobs some more,” she purred. “If you want.”

“Once this road gets a little better,” he said. “Need both hands to steer right now.”

“Awww,” she pouted adorably. “You’d rather not die in a horrible wreck than play with my boobs. I guess I can see what’s important to you.”

He chuckled. “Zip it.”

“Unzip it, you mean,” she giggled. “This gas tank is the greatest thing ever. I can see why you ride up front all the time.”

“Does more for you than it does for me,” he said.

“It does something for you,” she teased, wiggling her ass against his erection. “Don’t deny it.”

”Not the bike that’s doing that to me,” he husked into her ear. “It’s you.”

“Yeah?” she said. “Don’t lie to me. Tell the truth.”

“Girl, that fine ass of yours has got me so worked up I can’t think straight.”

“You like my butt?” she grinned, not fishing for compliments, not really, but unused to this kind of attention from him. She’d wanted to hear him say things like this for a while, and now he was, and it was almost too good to be true.

“I surely do.”

She giggled. “And here I was thinking you were all about my boobs. I gotta tell you, Joel, it makes me happy to learn that you’re so complicated.”

He laughed, a low, deep sound. She rested against him and placed her hands on the tops of his thighs, hoping he would say something else nice about her. Maybe something about her legs? Or her face? Or her puns? Her heroic actions? Her brilliant plans? Almost anything would do. Her body was still warm and relaxed, awash in endorphins.

“God, I want to come again so fucking much,” she whispered to herself, her words not carrying beyond the protection of her helmet. “Ugh. Shitty road. Fuck you for ruining the moment, I-80. Fuck you and your lousy blacktop.”

 

* * *

 

Second gear. Better, but not great. And the road was still split with tiny fissures in places. He might have to downshift again at any minute. They couldn’t get frisky under these conditions. She frowned, though he couldn’t see it.

He hadn’t said a word in more than half an hour. She frowned about that too.

He wasn’t hard anymore. Maybe guys couldn’t stay hard all day? She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t as horny as she had been earlier either. She wanted to be though. She wanted to feel his hands on her body, her belly, her boobs.

She took a deep breath and counted to ten, working up her nerve to do something crazy.

Then she counted to ten again.

Once more to ten.

She held her breath and grabbed the sleeve of her thermal top at the wrist, holding it fast with the fingers of one hand while sliding her other arm up and out of it so quickly that Joel didn’t have time to register what she’d done. She was sliding her arm out of the other sleeve when he finally took notice.

“Ellie? What the hell are you do-“

With both her arms inside her shirt now, she began to work it up, bunching it up around her neck, baring herself from the waist up.

“Warm today,” she said, as though this were a perfectly normal thing she was doing. Taking her shirt off on the bike was something she did all the time, right? Sure. Nothing to make a fuss about. If she was shaking a little, it wasn’t from suddenly getting her tits out. Badasses like her were bothered by something as unimportant as whipping out their tits. “Don’t you think so?”

She slung the shirt around her neck, draping it down her back like a cape. The wind that swirled in around the windscreen lapped and tickled at her skin.

“Wild child,” he snorted, impressed.

She giggled. He was hard again, and pressing against her butt just like she wanted him to.

 

* * *

 

“I can’t believe I’m doing this for you,” she giggled.

“You didn’t have to,” he responded in a sexy husk. “You coulda said no when I asked, girl.”

“Didn’t want to say no,” she murmured. “It’s just… well… I’ve never done this in front of a guy before.”

Her hands were on her breasts, caressing, fondling. She was glad she was wearing the red helmet. It hid how red her cheeks had become. She had been blushing all day, it seemed.

“You’re doin’ fine, beautiful.”

“I’ve had practice,” she snickered, her heart having leapt up in her throat at the word ‘beautiful’.

His beard brushed against her bare back, just above her shoulder blade and she pulled her shoulders up around her neck, tucking her jaw low between her shoulders, giggling, shy, still massaging her tits for him. She tugged and pulled at her throbbing nipples. He nuzzled her neck and shoulder again with his jaw.

“Tickles,” she said.

“Want me to stop?” he husked.

“No,” she purred. “Want _me_ to stop?”

“Nope,” he grinned, watching her play with her tits from the edges of his vision. “In fact… if you want to go a little further… I wouldn’t mind watchin’ that too.”

“Oh man,” she snickered, feeling wonderfully naughty. “Do you… Are you asking me to… you know…”

He worked his ass as far back on the seat as he could, making room for her to stretch out.

“Oh man… I don’t know if I can…” she squeaked nervously.

“Need more room?” he asked.

“Need more courage,” she countered, giggling.

His hand left the clutch, found her stomach, felt her tense in anticipation. His fingers worked their way down until they found the top of her fly. With surprising deftness, he unfastened the snap and worked the zipper down an inch… and then another. She groaned and leaned back, pushing down on his boots with the soles of her shoes, lifting herself up off the seat just a little, just enough for him to work the zipper all the way down. He slipped his thumb into the waistband of her panties, feeling the soft curls inside. She shivered and groaned. He tugged the elastic, pulling her panties away from her body. Cool air swirled inside, but that wasn’t the reason she was trembling.

“oh man,” she said, her voice a tiny peep.

“Want to show me what else you’ve never done in front of anybody before?” he rumbled into the side of her helmet in a voice so deep and sexy it made her heart ache a little.

Her hand was shaking. He felt it as she slid it inside her underwear, the skin of his thumb brushing against the back of her hand as her fingers found their way along her pubic mound to the tender lips hiding below.

“ohhhh mannn,” she whimpered, her fingers knowing just what to do, no matter how much they were trembling. “wowww…”

“Good girl,” he husked. “Show me how you like it, okay?”

“Mmm hhmm,” she moaned, and began to play with herself.

 

* * *

 

She rested against him, almost dozing. She tried to remember the last time she’d come so hard. Certainly not since she’d left Boston. There wasn’t time to do it right, usually. And even when there was, she’d always had to be quiet about it. Making noise was almost the best part (not the best part, obviously, but still really damn fun and it added to the experience so much when she could really get loud), but she’d always had to stifle herself so that Joel wouldn’t hear.

But not this time.

She’d made all kinds of noise. She’d probably scared the hell out of the birds in the trees they’d ridden past.

She giggled. The sweat on her chest had dried quickly in the breeze and her jeans were still open, partly tugged down around her hips to give her as much access to herself as possible. Inside her panties, her pussy was still hot, but it was cooling off too.

“I can’t believe I did that,” she groaned delightedly.

“I get the impression you enjoyed it,” he chuckled.

“I get the impression you enjoyed it, you pervert,” she snickered, stretching, pushing back against him. Her hands were on his knees. She reached back with one hand, with the limberness of youth, and checked with her fingers to see if he was still hard.

He was.

“Pervert,” she giggled. She rubbed it with her fingertips, hard and warm beneath the denim. She wondered if she should try to unzip his jeans. Would that be too much? Would he like that? She thought he would, but he might not. Maybe not while he was driving. She heard him groan a little as she scraped at it with her fingernails. “When we stop for the night, I’m going to take this thing out, you know.”

“You think so, huh?” he chuckled.

“Think? I _know_ ,” she snarked. “I’m getting this guy out to play. You just watch.”

“You’ll have to earn that, girl.”

“Earn? I just played with myself for the last hundred miles. _For you_ , you ass.” She snickered, and fought off a yawn. She was the good kind of tired now.

“More like three miles. You came pretty quick,” he teased.

“Hunh.” This genuinely surprised her. “Well, what can I tell you? It _seemed_ like a hundred miles. At least. I’m pretty confident that I’ve earned a peek at little Joel, thank you very much.” She smirked and looked back over her bare shoulder at him as she said this.

“Maybe I’ll make you cook dinner tonight,” he grinned.

“I don’t mind that. Be nice to have a good meal for a change.” She stuck her tongue out at him. She tasted the inside of the old fabric liner and realized that he couldn’t see the gesture. She felt very dumb at that moment.

“Naked,” he said with wink.

“What?” she exclaimed, cackling, surprised. Riley was right. All men wanted to look at naked women. They were obsessed with it.

“You heard me,” he grinned, his eyes crinkling at the edges behind the amber lenses of his shooters glasses. “You make dinner for me tonight, and you do it naked, and we’ll see about lettin’ this fella off his leash.”

She giggled mightily, her body shaking with the force of it. “You think _I’m_ scared? Heck, Joel, as soon as we get there, maybe I’ll just take off _all_ my clothes and walk around camp all night butt naked. What do you think about _that_?”

“Sounds pretty good to me.”

“Yeah? Pervert,” she hugged herself, the full consequence of her words suddenly settling on her. “Why would anybody want to see my skinny little butt walking around naked… Man, you’re a perv, Joel. What’s the Spanish word for pervert? I bet you know it.”

“Cochino,” he said and she repeated the word in a cute, sing-song voice. He chuckled. “You can also say pervertido. Means pretty much the same thing.”

“Pervertino?” she cackled, mispronouncing it accidentally. “You made that up! You’re such a bullshitter!”

“Nope,” he said. “That’s the right word.”

“Oh yeah? What’s the Spanish word for word? Wordo?” she giggled.

“Palabras,” he said. “Here’s another one. Bonita. That means pretty. Like you.”

“Aww,” she said, cutely flustered, taking a moment to find the suitable words. “Thanks, dude.”

His hand left the clutch and settled on her belly again. She placed her hands over his, one upon the other. He teased her navel with an exploring fingertip.

“Pervertino,” she cooed adoringly. Gently she pushed at his hand, coaxing him to move it a little lower. He obliged. She groaned as his fingertips slipped inside her panties and began to play with her pubic hair. She made a shuddering exhalation and tried to coax his hand a little lower. “Dirty old man… taking advantage of a poor little virgin orphan girl like me… You do this with all the girls you drive across country with?”

“Sure,” he growled, twirling her auburn curls around his fingers, lightly teasing the sensitive, soft skin underneath. He traced a light trail to the outer lips below, and then lightly brushed the inner lips, wet and warm, eager for his touch. She trembled, her fingers clutching at his hand nervously. From his vantage point above and behind her, he could see her breasts jiggling slightly as the bike jostled about on the old road. Her pink nipples were hard, the skin puckered and bumpy from the mixture of the wind and her rising excitement. He wanted to pinch them. He lightly stroked the hood of her engorged clit instead. His fingers were slick with her hot juices and slid easily across her skin. “I make this trip with a different girl every couple of months. Thought I’d try a redhead for a change.”

“fffffuuucck,” she whispered. Her stomach rose and fell in a rapid tempo. She was breathing fast again. “Y’re… s-such an… assssssssss…”

I’m going to hell, he thought and felt no regret. I’ve been heading that way for a long time.

His middle finger worked the skin of her clitoral hood back and forth gently but firmly. Too softly and she’d barely feel it. Too hard and she wouldn’t enjoy it. Experience let him know when he was applying just right amount of pressure. Her body told him, all he had to do was listen. This girl liked a light touch, her pussy said. But not too light.

“Joel… more…” she grunted.

“Soon as we get to a safe camp, your clothes are comin’ off,” he said firmly. “You don’t get to put them back on until I say so, girl. Deal?”

“Anything you want, boss,” she gasped, already dreaming of being his prisoner, his slave. His love slave. Images of abuse and degradation and submission assailing her from somewhere deep in her subconscious. Familiar images. Things she’d dreamed in recent weeks. She remembered being a bounty hunter with cool armor and a sweet spaceship. She remembered being captured by him… being turned into a dancing girl by him… being turned into a concubine by him… kept for her beauty… and her skill… in bed… his bed… his sex slave. She belonged to him in that dream .She belonged to him on this motorcycle. She was ready to surrender to him. She couldn’t wait to get undressed for him. Maybe he would undress her himself. Maybe he would take all her clothes away and never let her wear anything again. She would be naked forever in a few hours. Naked for the rest of her life. Naked for him. Her heart was racing as she saw it all unfolding in her mind. Naked and helpless. So good. Would he tie her up? What would he make her do if he did? She wouldn’t be able to stop him. He could make her do anything. She would do anything. She groaned, “Keep doing that and I’ll do anything you want.”

“You like it?” he said, his cheek against the shell of her helmet, his voice made deeper by the chamber of the shell around her head.

“Yes,” she gasped. “God, yes.”

“Which one of us is the pervert now?”

“F-fuck you,” she chortled breathlessly, grinning widely, loving how he teased her, squirming against him, her legs as open she could manage. Her body wanted more than this. Her body wanted to fuck. Her head was back. Sunlight streamed down through the visor onto her face. She closed her eyes against it but it reached her through her eyelids all the same. Or maybe the light was coming from inside her. It felt like it. A torch was burning in her belly, radiating out through her limbs, suffusing her with light and warmth.

“You just wait,” he said coolly. The road ahead was smooth enough for as far as he could see. He should have enough time to get her off before he needed both hands to steer again. “You’re gonna get it tonight, girl. Smart mouth like you’ve got? Only one thing to do about it. Turn you over my knee and spank you, I reckon.”

“Oh God!” she gasped suddenly, arching her back, lifting her bottom off the seat just a little. The cheeks of her ass clenched together. Her jeans hung low beneath her butt, the pistol in her back pocket weighing them down. Her pussy began to convulse and she tried to push his entire hand down, wanting him to cover her sex, hold her, cup her while she came. He did and tears formed at the edges of her eyes. Why? Gratitude, maybe? Love? She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t think about anything. She felt a single large finger slip inside her, just a little, just enough. The mouth of her pussy pulled at it, almost kissed it, trying to pull it deeper. Her hips pushed at him, inviting him in. She would have begged if she’d could have made proper words. She gasped and wailed and bucker her hips instead. She needed more of him. Just a little more. She wasn’t greedy. Just a little more of that amazingly thick finger. He obliged. As far as the second knuckle, maybe. Perfect. _Perfect_. “OH FUCK! _FUCK!!_ ”

That was quick, he thought, smiling, quite pleased with himself.

 

* * *

 

A mile of blacktop rolled beneath the wheels before either of them said anything. Ellie was the first to speak, of course.

“You’re really going to make me cook dinner n-naked?” she asked, stumbling a bit on the last word, hating that she didn’t sound cooler. She wasn’t a dumb kid. She shouldn’t sound like one. It wasn’t fair.

“You’re doin’ everything naked tonight, Ellie,” Joel said with tone of a man who was speaking the absolute, unquestioned truth. It ticked her off a little, how sure he was about his plans and her place in them, but it turned her on more. “You said it yourself. It’s warm today. You should thank me for it, come to think of it.”

“Pssh,” she said. “Like I’m scared of you seeing me naked or whatever. Doesn’t bother me.”

“That a fact, huh?”

“Sure. I’m not worried about that. It’s not like you haven’t seen me before. No big deal, dude.” She looked off at the horizon to the left, to where the northern winds would come roaring towards them in another day or two. “Heck, if we weren’t moving, I’d take them off right now. No biggie, you know?”

Joel chuckled, impressed by her bravado. “Wild child.”

”If we still had the truck,” she continued boldly, “I’d be in the backseat undressing right now. That’s just how I am, dude. But _somebody_ wrecked that truck. And this bike doesn’t have enough of a backseat, you know. Not my fault.”

She knew he was going to make her pay for that later, but she didn’t care. Sometimes you had to score points when you could.

The bike was slowing down, she realized with a start. She could feel his right foot beneath hers, pressing down on the brake pedal. Once he squeezed the front brake lever with his right hand, the bike came to a complete stop.

“Wh-what are we doing?” she asked in a very tiny voice, crossing her arms over her bare breasts. Strangely, she felt very naked now that they weren’t moving. The red Honda must have generated some kind of protective bubble as it rolled along, but now that was gone.

“Stoppin’ long enough for you to get undressed, girl.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What will happen next week? Gosh! Who knows! I’ll guess we’ll all have to come back on Saturday (hopefully) for chapter twenty-eight: The Path.


	28. The Path

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A bridge ahead. A rest stop on the other side. The promise of a good night’s sleep. And maybe the hope of something more. Ellie is ready to lose her virginity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who’s back! Reginald Wifflebutt Daniels in da house! :-D
> 
> (Warning: Old people using outdated slang to sound hip. Use caution around the elderly)

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 28 – The Path**

 

_Why am I such a big chicken?_

Ellie chewed her bottom lip, her face hidden inside the safe confines of Kristi Chau’s old red motorcycle helmet. The visor was down, sealing her away safe and sound, where Joel couldn’t see the nervous excitement tugging and worrying at every corner of her face. She was blushing, though no one knew it but her. She had her heart-shaped sunglasses on. The world outside the helmet was tinted a dusky blue-gray. Her emerald eyes darted about, wet and lovely, nervous, behind the cheap plastic lenses.

_Fuck! I’m such a big chicken._

_Go ahead and get undressed, he said. You think I won’t, I said. I’m not chicken, I said._

_But I was. I’m just a big, scared chicken._

“Fuck, Ellie,” she hissed softly enough that only she could hear it. “Why didn’t you just do it?”

_Because I’m a chicken. A big, fraidy cat chicken._

She grunted irritably, a short, sharp sound, and frowned. Her eyes grew hard. She wished she could go back in time and get a do-over.

The sign that whipped past them read:

             WALCOTT  
           NEXT RIGHT

She could see the little town off in the distance. Just a spot on the side of the road, as Joel called these sorts of places. She could see a low, rectangular building, white with yellow and orange stripes around the top. A Shell gas station, like the one where she and Joel had found this bike, miles and miles back, a long ways east, in West Virginia. There was another white building across the parking lot from the Shell station, maybe a restaurant, and another smaller, squarer building beyond that one. She wondered if they were going to pull off, search for supplies. Walcott looked pretty empty. They’d probably be the first visitors the little town had seen in years.

Joel drove past the off-ramp without slowing down.

_So long, Walcott._

Ellie settled in and let her thoughts return to the road behind them and how her nerves had failed her.

_He stopped the bike… told me to get off and take my clothes off…He was going to make me ride the rest of the way to Tommy’s butt naked, he said._

Ellie gulped, her throat tight.

_I climbed down with my shirt around my neck like a cape… and I stood there with my tits out and my thumbs in the waistband of my jeans… I’d unzipped them… he could see my panties… I had my thumbs inside the elastic of my underwear too… I was going to pull everything down in one go… like pulling off a band-aid… one quick move and I’d show him everything…I’d show him I wouldn’t back down from a challenge… I’d show him… that I wasn’t a pussy by showing him… my pussy._

Ellie tried to swallow, suddenly excited and ashamed.

_And I couldn’t do it._

_I chickened out like a big wuss._

The girl squeezed the foregrip of her shotgun with tight fingers, frustrated at how she’d failed to follow through. Her hands weren’t shaking now, but they had been then.

_Why was I so scared? I’m almost fifteen! And it’s not like he hasn’t seen me naked before. Hell, I practically skipped past him naked back at that farm by that stupid river. It’s not like he hasn’t seen my pus-_

_God, he fingered me! Just a little! Oh man! I can’t believe that happened! I played with myself and he joined in and… and…_

_Fuck! Joel fingered me!_

_Holy cow, that was so fucking cool. And hot!_

She bit her bottom lip again and smiled with shy, intense, virginal lust.

_I can’t believe we did that! Oh man!_

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head ruefully. Small fingers squeezed the wooden grips of the shotgun again.

_Why did I chicken out?!_

_Why didn’t I just take off my stupid pants?!_

_Fuck, Ellie, you big wuss. If you’d climbed back up on this bike naked, you and Joel would’ve probably pulled off back at Walcott and you’d be losing your virginity in that little town back there!_

_You could be fucking Joel right now, you big wuss!_

“Gah!” she grunted, angry and frustrated with herself.

“What’s that, kiddo?” Joel asked from his position ahead of her, from the space outside the little world of her red helmet.

“Nothing,” she lied. “Just wondering why we didn’t pull over at the little town back there. That’s all.”

_Liar! Tell him! Tell him to turn around and go back to Walcott! Tell him you want to fuck! Tell him you’re ready! TELL HIM!_

“We’re good on gas right now,” he answered. “And little towns that close to the highway are pretty much always picked clean, yeah?”

“Yeah. Good point,” she nodded. “I guess I shoulda thought of that, huh?”

“Or maybe,” he said, and she could see his reflection in the windscreen of the Honda as she spoke – he was smirking, “you’re stallin’… trying to keep us from gettin’ to camp too soon… ‘cause you know what’s gonna happen when we get there.”

Ellie blushed and lowered her head, even though he couldn’t see her face inside the helmet. She giggled and it quickly became a crazy, cackling sound.

“Um… Naked dinner?” she said, not daring to look up, smiling manically.

“Naked everything,” he teased, a tone she heard so rarely from him. “For _you_ , girl. I’m just gonna watch while you cook dinner and set up the tent and all sorts of stuff.”

“You’re not going to join me in all this unnecessary nakedness? You butthead!” she laughed, smacking his shoulder with one hand. “Pervert! I’ve heard about guys like you! Peeping Toms! You’re worse than that guy who drilled a hole in my shower!”

He laughed. She did too. His was loud and lusty. Hers was small and nervous, horny and tense. She clung to her shortened shotgun with both hands, like a good luck charm.

The low hills rolled by on either side of them, green and grassy. To their left, the hills rose sharply, almost like little mountains. To their right, the land remained mostly flat, with a long row of regularly spaced telephone poles marking distance. Most of the ancient wires had fallen to earth years ago, victims of storms, winds, age, or simple neglect. They were just crosses now, tall and splintery, waiting for martyrs and criminals and saviors who had to die so that the world might be saved whether it deserved it or not.

Visions of the old Saint Philomena’s Children’s Home suddenly danced unbidden at the edges of Ellie’s mind. That place had more crucifixes than anyone could count. On every wall, in every corner, on every windowsill. Or so it had seemed to Ellie as a little girl. She had been raised by those nuns to love God and Jesus, both of whom were the same guy but also different people. She had never been too clear on that point. But she had been assured that God loved her and so did Jesus and she should pray every night and thank them for the gift of another day of life in a world that seemed so much safer inside those walls than it became when she was too old to stay there any longer, which wasn’t the fault of the nuns, it was just how things were. New orphans were always showing up. You had to make room. And so pray she had. Until Riley died. Then she sort of stopped praying for a while. But now she found herself doing it again from time to time. And she didn’t know if she even believed in God anymore. But she knew she wanted to believe in him and maybe that was good enough? It’s not like God or Jesus or whoever was sending down angels left and right to smite the fuck out of assholes who needed a good smiting like in those stories Sister Anne and Sister Cecilia read to her and the other kids at story time. God smacked the shit out of everyone back then and little Ellie had been sure that stuff like that still happened, or could, at least. But she was older now, no longer possessed of the absolute faith of a child, and it seemed the only smiting that got done nowadays was the smiting you did yourself.

“I’ve smited a lot of motherfuckers since I left Boston,” she whispered glumly.

She didn’t want to kill anyone, not if she could help it. But some assholes just didn’t give you a choice.

“Smite or get smited,” she said to no one in particular.

“What’s that?” Joel called back to her.

“Nothing. Just talking to myself,” she chirped as innocently as she could.

“Alright then,” Joel shrugged, not looking back, his eyes focused on the cracked and split blacktop stretching out before them.

Ellie suddenly remembered Kevin Chiang, an older boy at the orphanage, the one who’d swiped her beloved Snoopy doll and burned it to ash just because he thought it would be fun to destroy a six-year-old girl’s most treasured possession. Whenever the kids had to sing songs for Sunday school, Kevin often changed the lyrics to something borderline dirty to amuse the eleven and twelve year old girls in the classroom. Father Crocetti was never amused. Sister Abigail always did her best not to laugh – she was a kind woman and a great cook, but looking back on it, she was a pretty lousy nun.

“He’s got the whole world… in his pants,” Ellie sang very, very softly, grinning. “He’s got the whole wide world… in his pants…”

 

* * *

 

_I was sitting on the sofa, the one he took a nap on while we were waiting for Tess to get back. I was sitting there with Riley and she was holding my hand because I was so nervous. We were both wearing our blue cadet uniforms. I don’t know why. If we had run away from the prep school, why would we still be wearing our stupid uniforms? Dreams are so dumb sometimes._

They were going slow. The road was bad. Joel weaved and banked the trusty old Gold Wing around the holes and gaps in the decaying pavement.

_He checked the hallway, a gun in his hand, and when he was sure no one had followed us, he closed the door and locked it. We were alone with him now in that apartment. No one coming. We were alone. Riley was pretending like she wasn’t nervous. But I could tell she was. I was more nervous. I couldn’t hide it so I didn’t even try. I knew what was about to happen and I was scared._

She held the shotgun across her chest with one hand. She gripped his belt with the other. This old bike didn’t have seatbelts and falling off wouldn’t do her much good.

_He walked over to us and I could see that he had a hard-on inside his jeans. I looked at Riley and saw her looking at it. She seemed to like what she saw. I did too, I think. But I was nervous. Riley was the one who’d had a boyfriend. Hell, I didn’t even know if I really liked boys or not._

She could have just as easily held on to the shoulder strap of his backpack or the back of his belt. But she was holding it by the front, her arm around his waist, the cool metal of the buckle against her knuckle. He was hard, his erect cock close to her small hand, straining against the denim, but she didn’t know it.

_We’d gone to Marlene after we ran away. But Marlene wasn’t interested in taking us in. She’d said she owed a guy a lot of guns. Guns she couldn’t afford to trade. She traded me and Riley to him instead. She didn’t tell us that’s what she was doing, of course. She said she was taking us to a smuggler who could get us out of the city. Get us somewhere safe. We believed her. Then she took us to meet him and asked him if he’d accept two girls instead of the guns. What am I gonna do with a couple of teenagers, he asked. Whatever you want to do with them, Marlene said. That’s when Riley figured it out. I was a dummy, I guess. I didn’t realize what he had planned until he’d taken us halfway across Boston through that secret tunnel and we were in that apartment and he was standing there in front of us with a big boner in his pants._

Her eyes barely saw the sign ahead.

              I-80 WEST

               RAWLINS  
             20.5 MILES

          ROCK SPRINGS  
              127 MILES

_He reached out to Riley with his hand. She stood up and took it. You first, I guess, he said. Cool, I didn’t want to be sloppy seconds, Riley said. I was still holding on to Riley’s other hand with both hands. It’s cool, Boo, she said. It’s cool. It’ll be fun, you’ll see. And then she went into the bedroom with him and closed the door. I sat there alone. Scared. But curious. And then the sounds started… sex sounds. He did stuff that made Riley make all kinds of noises. Cherry Jackson said that guys liked it when you made noises during sex. He must have liked doing it with Riley a lot because she was making some really great noises. She sounded like she was having the time of her life in there. And I was getting all hot and bothered sitting alone on the sofa listening to them. It sounded… fun._

Ellie slid the shotgun a few inches to the left as discretely as she could manage, until the hard edge of the wooden foregrip was pressed against her tingling nipple. The contact felt amazing. She worked it very discretely against the swollen knob of flesh, groaning faintly. She sighed and smiled inside the helmet. She was a ninja.

_He was making some pretty great noises by the end too. Both of them. They were really into it. Then they were done. Everything was quiet for a bit. Then the bedroom door opened and Riley came out naked and sweaty and she was practically glowing from the great sex she’d just had with him. She walked over to me and I felt so dorky in my dumb cadet uniform. She was all hot and sexy and grown up and naked and glossy and I felt like the dumbest, awkwardest, homeliest kid sister on planet earth. She was still breathing kind of fast. You okay, I asked her like a big doofus. Better than okay, she grinned. She reached down and squeezed my hands and pulled me up so I was standing next to her and she was so naked and sexy and shiny and I wanted to be just like her._

There were bridges in the distance spanning a river she couldn’t see from this far away. She wondered idly if maybe Joel would stop the bike at the river and declare it laundry day. The last one had been more than a week ago. All her clothes were dirty now and she’d worn most of them twice now. Clean clothes would be nice. If she was going to be naked in camp, might as well wash everything she owned.

“Think we can do some laundry in that river?” she called, her voice fighting the wind. They were going faster now that the roads were a little better.

“Maybe,” Joel said, glancing back at her, his hazel eyes twinkling, hinting at his thoughts, imagining her naked and splashing around knee-deep in the water. “We’ll have to check it out first.”

“‘Kay,” she shouted, grinning, and settled back into her seat, letting her mind drift again. She would be naked soon. And now so would he. She felt relaxed and tense at the same time.

_We went into the bedroom, Riley sort of pulling me along behind her. He was in bed. The sheet was down around his waist and his chest was hairy and muscle-y. He was sweaty, like Riley. Sex was hard work, I guess. Here she is, Riley said. And I waved and said hello like an idiot. He looked at me like I was a piece of candy. Let me see you, he said. I didn’t know what to say. Riley giggled. Take your clothes off, he said. I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt, and I couldn’t remember how they worked or something. Riley rolled her eyes and smiled then started to undress me and I let her. I just stood there while Riley got me naked and he watched. His dick got hard before she even had my pants off. I could see the shape of his big thing sticking up from underneath the sheets, just like back at the Motel 6, when I was watching him sleep and he had a hard-on._

          FORT STEELE  
            REST AREA

           NEXT RIGHT

_See, mister? Told you she’s pretty, Riley said. She sure is, he said. And I smiled. I wanted to be pretty, like Riley. And sexy, like Riley. You said she’s a virgin, he asked. Yeah, Riley said and I felt like I wanted to hide behind something. It’s no fun being the only virgin in the room. But she’s done some stuff, Riley said. Yeah? With who, he asked. With me, Riley said, and lemme tell you, she’s a good kisser. Then Riley kissed me in front of him. A good kiss too. The kind that seems to go on and on. Her hands were on my back when we started and then slid down to my butt. I put my arms around her neck and she started playing with my boobs while we kept kissing and he watched. I wanted him to watch. Kissing Riley was something I was comfortable with and finally kissing her in front of somebody was exciting. Especially exciting to do it in front of him. I wanted him to see. I wanted him to know. I wanted everyone to know. I wasn’t some dumb kid. I knew what I was doing. Sort of. Then Riley put her hands on my shoulders and made me kneel down and eat her pussy right there in front of him! God, it was so embarrassing. But he seemed to like watching me do that to her. Cherry Jackson said every guy dreams about watching two girls going at it. Wouldn’t they rather be with one of the girls than just sit and watch? Boys are weird about stuff. But I did like knowing that he was watching me do that to Riley, even if I wouldn’t ever admit it to anyone. I made her come so fucking hard._

          NORTH PLATTE  
                  RIVER

Ellie smiled inside her helmet, not even seeing the sign.

_He pulled the sheet aside and told me to get in bed with him. I took Riley’s hand and tried to bring her along. Nuh-uh, she said, I’m just going to watch. He put his hand around my waist to keep me from running away like a big chicken. I was so nervous. I could see his thing down there, under the sheet he was holding up. I could see all of it. Hell, I could’ve just reached out and touched it, it was so close to me. She can join in later, after I’ve had you to myself for a while, he said. Get in there, Boo, Riley giggled, patting my butt. I leaned down to kiss him. I knew how to do that. Riley told me I was a good kisser. I would show him that she was right. I could still taste her in my mouth when I kissed him._

The bridge looked to be in decent shape. A few old, rusted cars here and there, but nothing blocking their way. The Honda rolled towards them at a good clip. The blacktop was better here.

_Riley sat on the edge of the bed… watching… watching me lay there on my back with my legs up in the air… watching me get fucked for the first time… watching me with him… watching and smiling… she held my hand near the end… when he was about to come… I already had… it was so good… she held my hand and he came… and I did too. Again. Man, it was so good. We were his now. Me and Riley. We were his girls. And we were all going to be together safe and sound forever. He slid off and Riley got on all fours over me. We kissed and kissed, like we did back when it was just the two of us. She started rocking back and forth, slowly then faster. And then I realized he was boning Riley from behind. Doggy style. Cherry Jackson said that guys like to do it like that. Cherry knew everything about sex. Even more than Riley. Way more than me, that’s for sure. I liked him on top. I liked having my legs open and him between them. Looking up at him while he… I don’t know why. It just felt… natural. This is the tightest ass I’ve ever had, he grunted. I hadn’t realized that he was doing her like that! Riley giggled, taking it back there like a boss. Hers is gonna be even tighter, Riley said, kissing me before I could tell them I wasn’t sure I was ready for butt sex. I’ll find out in a few minutes, he grunted. I trembled, all scared and stuff, but Riley kept kissing me and I hoped I could take it up the butt as cool and sexy as Riley did. Cherry said guys really liked it when you let them do you in the pooper. But you had to be careful. Some guys didn’t know what they were doing back there. You had to make sure they knew how to do it right and you had to make sure you really liked them first. That was important, Cherry said. Riley had let Montego stick it in her butt. He didn’t know how to do it right, as it turned out. But this guy seemed to be doing it the right way. Riley was sure enjoying it, I could tell that from the sounds she was making._

There was something moving behind the ruined station wagon up ahead on her right.

_Riley let me lay my head in her lap. I was on all fours, up on my knees and elbows. My butt was way up in the air. He got in place behind me on the bed. I felt his hands on my hips._

A figure. A shape glimpsed through the scummy old glass.

_You’ll like it, Riley said, just relax and enjoy it. He knows exactly what -_

A man. And a rifle. Ellie’s hands began to move without conscious thought, her mind still replaying the events of last night’s dream. The barrels of her shotgun passed in front of her visor like the hands of a clock swinging around. The vision of Riley’s welcoming thighs, making a pillow her head, brown hands stroking red hair and freckled cheeks while Joel worked his big hard cock super deep into her welcoming butt began to fade from her mind’s eye as adrenaline began to surge through her veins. It was all happening too fast. She couldn’t push the dream out her head fast enough, despite what her brain was screaming at her.

_There’s somebody -_

_( - you need, Boo - )_

_\- behind that glass!_

The man was filthy, his clothes stitched-together rags. The rifle in his hands was rusty, poorly maintained. Maybe he’d fished it out of the river or something. The barrel was coming up. The bullet about to leave that barrel was going to strike Joel in the chest. Joel hadn’t seen him yet. His eyes were looking to the left, at the rusty edge of an old Ford Ranger partially in the other lane, an obstacle the Honda had to avoid.

“Apúrese!” the man shouted from a mouth with only half as many teeth as it ought to have. The few he still had were stained a rich, creamy, yellow. Some of the cavities were large enough to be seen from the back seat of a speeding motorcycle.

The lingering sensation of Joel slowly pushing his long shaft into the wonderfully tight confines of her ass as she offered it up to him at Riley’s urging was still in the back of her mind when she heard a loud explosion, too powerful to be swept away by the wind. The unwashed hunter with the bad teeth exploded above the neck, half his face flying away in streaming ribbons of bone and brain. Ellie yelped in shock. Her finger was on the foremost trigger of her shotgun; a great gout of smoke and fire was still streaming from the bottom barrel. Joel shouted, a wordless, barking noise. Other men were shouting from up ahead, emerging from hiding spots behind old vehicles. Ellie swiveled the shotgun around, aiming carefully alongside Joel’s right arm. A man, no more than thirty feet away, cleaner than the first, was shoving his hands towards them, a big automatic pistol held tight. She pulled the second trigger and meat detonated from his stomach in a sickening spray. Another man no more than ten feet beyond that one was scrambling up, a compact, cut-down assault rifle in his hands. Murder was in his eyes. Everyone was shouting: Joel, herself, and the men on the bridge. She was making nonsense sounds. Fear. Anger. Incoherent sounds raging against an unfair universe. The men were shouting in a language she didn’t know.

“Hang on!” Joel was shouting.

But she couldn’t. Her hands were busy reloading. She screamed profanity as she worked.

With her right arm, she tucked the shotgun in close to her side and thumbed the release lever. A pair of spent red shotgun shells rocketed into the air behind her with a ‘floomp’, trailing thin lines of white smoke to mark their passage. Her left hand was in her front pocket, digging out the pair of spare shells she kept there. She pulled the first one out, a bright and cheery blue one. She had thought it was a very pretty color when she had bought it from the red-haired woman in Burlington.

The man with the assault rifle had the rifle pulled in tight to his shoulder, his cheek snug against the frame, lining up his shot through the sights of the weapon. Time was up. Ellie crammed the single shell into the gun and slammed the weapon closed. She thrust it out at him, so much closer than he was just a few seconds before. She couldn’t remember which barrel she had pushed the shell into so she curled a finger around each of the two triggers and pulled them both.

The blast of pellets caught the man in his left arm. The stream of bullets pumping out of his gun struck the blacktop ahead of the Honda’s front tire, the fender of the bike, the windscreen, the headlight, the turn signal, the gas tank, and the rusty old Ford the bike was passing. The Honda began to veer sharply, Joel fighting to regain control. A lovely blue shell leapt into the air with a pleasing ‘floomp’, sailing past her baby fat plump, freckled cheek.

When the bullet arrived, the shotgun was in her hand, open, waiting to be reloaded. The world was titled at a crazy angle, Joel being only marginally in control of the heavy motorcycle. A sea green shell was in her hand, the last of the handful of original shells that Joel had scrounged up on the morning when she’d found the neat little shotgun lying alongside the dead body of Kristi Chau in the gloom of a gas station restroom.

Ellie saw the bullet coming.

It spun slowly, rather beautifully, glinting and shining in the bright light of day. Smoke was reaching out for it with thin fingers from the large cloud of sparks and soot still expanding from barrel of a revolver pointed at her. The gun was in the left hand of another man twenty feet behind the man tumbling to the ground, the man with assault rifle, the man with the big wound gouged into his arm by her shotgun. It was a lucky shot for both of them: the girl with the hastily fired shotgun and the man with the pistol. Neither of them had aimed, really. There hadn’t been time. The man had lost his right hand back in the spring, just a few months before. He could barely shoot straight with his left hand. He had said a quick prayer before pulling the trigger, sending every bullet he had at the shrieking girl in the denim jeans and white thermal top who was killing his friends with surprising ease. He had promised God that if He would let him kill her, then he wouldn’t rape the girl even if the others did. He hadn’t had a woman in a long while, but he desperately wanted to stop her from killing any more of his friends. They were a long way from home, he and his friends, and there were only a few of them left. Surely God could help him out today after ignoring his prayers for so long.

The bullet was lead, of course, but wrapped in a gorgeous copper jacket that encased the nose and tapered around the sides. It glittered like the contraband earrings Melody Phillips wore, the ones her boyfriend had given her after he had left the prep school and became a civilian instead of joining the army. Melody had spurned the army too. She had joined her boyfriend somewhere in the Boston QZ. Somewhere safe, Ellie had hoped. She’d always liked Melody, even if Riley had said the girl was a bleach blonde. There had been a party for Melody the night before she’d left the school. Ellie had hugged her. Melody had always been nice to everyone, even brats like Ellie. She had never seen Melody again. She hoped Melody was safe somewhere. Safe with her boyfriend. Not dead like Riley. Alone and unburied like Riley.

The bullet sparkled as it came towards her, the prettiest, most mesmerizing thing she had ever seen. Nothing else in the world seemed to move. Everything was frozen. Still. Quiet. Ellie wanted to cry. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. All she wanted to do was help but that guy over there had decided to shoot her in the face. She was a good kid. She knew she was. She would have helped everybody, even him, if he had just let her.

At last the bullet arrived with a violent thud. Her neck snapped back and to the side and the world went dark, speeding up as it did. Everything was suddenly moving too fast. Things were now too quiet in one ear and too loud in the other. She couldn’t see. She was shrieking like a rabbit. She hadn’t known bunnies could scream until she’d left Boston, until she’d had to hunt for her food to make the canned stuff last as long as it could for those days when they couldn’t find any game to hunt, game like squirrels and bunnies and other animals that always went down quick and clean and quiet until she’d missed a shot with the big Winchester, maiming the poor little rabbit instead of killing it. She’d been so frozen by the sound the poor brown bunny made that Joel had drawn his Colt and jogged over to it and killed it just to stop the godawful noise. There was too much noise now. Gunshots and screams and the roar of the big Honda’s engine. Joel was shouting too, saying something important but she couldn’t make out the words. She was fumbling at the helmet with both hands trying to get it off trying to find out how bad she’d been hurt trying to stay alive long enough to get the cure out of her blood and then she could rest then she could be with Joel and live a normal life finally or maybe she could die and be done with all this bullshit and be with Riley again and maybe her mom would be there too and maybe her mom would tell her how proud she was of her and maybe Mom would have her daughter’s old Snoopy doll that a boy no older than eleven had turned to smoke and charred fluff for no fucking reason whatsoever because that’s just how life was all shitty and fucked up and sad even when you tried your hardest to have hope and never give up and keep trying and trying no matter what and then the world was turning, and the wind pulled at her and she could feel her lunch coming up and she was vomiting and trying to hold it in her mouth and the bike wasn’t between her legs anymore and everything was going end over end over end over and then the water swallowed her up.

 

* * *

 

Darkness. Mud. Wet clothes. Soggy shoes. A mouthful of water that tasted like a mix of dirty river and puke. Coughing. Hands pulling her along by the straps of her backpack. Shouting too. There was lots of that. Most of it came from the men on the bridge, but the loudest shouting was coming from Joel. He had her. He always had her. She wanted to smile, even though there was still a little bit of muddy vomit in her mouth.

“C’mon!” Joel was saying, his voice distorted and crackling. There was water in one of her ears. “Behind here!”

“oh god” she moaned, coughing the words out, each syllable fouled with river water and the sour, partially digested mess of sauerkraut and Spam that had been in her stomach for less than an hour. She wouldn’t want that stuff on the menu again for a long while. She couldn’t see. She didn’t know how bad she was hurt. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to be blind either.

“Here,” he said, easing her down in the mud, resting her back against something that wasn’t a rock, something she couldn’t see. The butt sank into mud that was remarkably cold for such a warm day.

His voice was heavy with concern for her. It made her heart leap up. She didn’t care quite so much that she might be blind forever and ever which was going to suck in ways she couldn’t even imagine yet. She pawed at the red shell encasing her head.

“Fuck! I’ve been shot!” she coughed, blind, half-deaf, fumbling with the helmet.

Joel eased it off, her broken sunglasses falling out as he did so. The helmet had never been a snug fit on her head and the impact of the bullet had spun it around until the visor was covering the side of her head and her ear. Her hearing in the ear not filled with water returned to normal. She blinked. She could see. She was fine. The bullet had struck the helmet, not her. A small hole had been punched into the edge of the black rubber trim that lined the opening for the face. A large slice of the visor had been shattered by the bullet and few inches on the other side of it, a big hole at least three fingers wide had been blasted out of the side of the shell, a ragged, sharp opening filled with teeny tiny bits of shiny bits of metallic red plastic and long, white strands of cotton-like fiberglass helmet liner drooped down the side of the helmet, soaked and dripping river water. She looked at it, marveled at how close that bullet had been to striking her in the eye, the same eye that had the old, ugly scar splitting the eyebrow in half and marking her forehead. She hated that scar. She’d liked it as a kid. It made her look tough. But now she wanted to look pretty and that scar was getting in the way and she realized that she was thinking about too many things at once and this wasn’t the time to be thinking about anything but survival.

She blinked again, focusing on the bullet hole in the ruined helmet.

_Holy cow that was close. How did I…_

“Okay. Maybe I wasn’t shot,” she grinned, thrilled to be unharmed. She wiped the wet sleeve of her white thermal shirt across her mouth.

Joel carefully pushed her wet bangs out of the way, checking her scalp for any visible blood… or bone…her scalp wasn’t peeled back anywhere that he could see.

“Thank Christ! You ain’t hit!” he exhaled in gratitude.

“Oh good. For a minute there, I thought they shot me in the face,” she started to say, but he kissed her and the last of those words never fully made it out into daylight.

She melted.

_We can stay here forever, God. That’d be just fine, thanks. Ellie, future mother of the river people. That has a nice ring to it. We can start a cool new society here, Joel._

A man’s voice carried down to her from somewhere behind and above.

“Me disparó! Esa puta me disparó!”

_Oh, that’s right. Those fuckers. Forgot all about ‘em for a minute there. Silly me._

“Encuéntralos!” another man shouted. His voice was higher in pitch but laden with authority. He was the leader, Ellie imagined. Men who spoke like that expected to be obeyed. She’d heard the tone often from officers and sergeants back in the QZ.

“Shit,” Joel said. “They’re gonna find us in a minute.”

“Where’s my shotgun?” Ellie asked, still blinking the world back into proper focus.

“Hell if I know,” Joel said. His revolver was in his hand and he was checking the cylinder. “Probably out there in the mud somewhere with my shotgun and the damn huntin’ rifle.”

“I kinda threw up a little,” she offered, digging her pistol out of her back pocket. They were behind an old GMC truck. All the tires were missing and the hulk was lying on its side in the thick mud. She had never seen the underside of a truck before, not up close anyway. It was kind of neat in a complicated, mechanical way. “Probably should’ve said something before you kissed me. Where are we?”

“Down on the river bank,” Joel said as he slipped off his pack to get more ammunition from it. His boots were sunk deep into the gooey mud. “Bike was pissin’ gas everywhere and the front tire got popped. Too many of those sonsabitches to fight. Had to jump the bike off the bridge into the river.”

“Really? Holy shit!” she exclaimed in a high, excited voice. She looked around, saw the river rushing by just ten feet away, her brain suddenly hearing the sound of the water. She would later swear that she hadn’t heard it at all until the moment she saw it. The brain is a funny thing, she would insist.

There were tracks, deep footprints, Joel’s mostly. He had pulled himself and her from the water and brought them to the safety of this old truck. From the look of it, she had been on her feet, but she had been as much dragged as walked to this refuge. She didn’t remember making the trip from the river. That was troubling. More troubling, however, there was no sign of the old Gold Wing.

“The bike?” she asked as Joel grabbed her bicep and pulled her back just a little deeper into concealment.

“Bottom of the river, kid,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Fuck,” she whispered as a slowly dawning realization began to settle on her.

_The chess set. The big blue tarp. The rope. A lot of the ammo. Most of the food. Most of the water. Most of the clothes. Towels too. All the gasoline._

Gone. So much of their stuff gone. Gone like it had never existed.

“Encuéntralos!” the man on the bridge shouted again.

“We’re walking to Jackson now, huh?” Ellie said, trying very hard not to think about the loss of chess set. How would she ever get her chance to finally beat Joel in a game of chess now?

“At least we’re still able to walk,” Joel said. He was shoving spare magazines for the .45 into his shirt pockets. His pistols were out and ready. No long guns. Shooting it out with pistols at this range was going to waste a lot of ammo.

She checked the chamber of her pistol, easing the slide back just a little. Loaded. She nodded at him. “What’s the plan, boss?”

“Still figurin’ it out,” Joel grimaced, taking in the lay of the land.

They had emerged on the far side of the river, covering an impressive distance while airborne. The water was to their left. The bridge was ahead of them, on the other side of the wrecked truck, maybe fifteen yards away. There were trees to their right, behind them, marking the bend of the river and the forest beyond, a good place to disappear, but there was too much mud between here and there. If they tried for the treeline, they’d move too slowly, and almost certainly get a few bullets in their backs for the trouble.

“Allí! Allá abajo!” one of the men on the bridge was saying. “Huellas en el fango!”

They were speaking quickly and Joel’s Spanish was very rusty. Somewhere up there, a man was screaming in pain, howling almost continuously, making it even harder to pick out the words being shouted back and forth by the men on the bridge.

“What are they saying?’ Ellie asked. “Can you understand any of that?”

“It’s Spanish,” Joel said, risking a quick glance around the side of the wreck.

“What are they saying?” Ellie repeated, pressing close, trying to peer around him. She glimpsed a pair of figures along the top of the structure and momentarily marveled at how far they must have flown on the powerful red Honda before splashing down like a spaceship coming back from the moon. Her eyes widened at the sight of what they had done and she whispered softly, “Oh man.”

Joel pushed her back against the truck, out of sight. “They’re sayin’ they’ve seen our footprints.”

“Allí! Los veo!” another man shouted, a new voice Ellie hadn’t heard before. “Detrás de la ruina! Mira!”

“Yep,” Joel glowered. “They’ve seen us.”

“Fuck,” the girl hissed.

“Hey! Wedo!” one taunted, mostly likely the leader.

“Güero loco! Ha ha!” called another, almost cheering for Joel.

“What are they saying?” Ellie asked.

Joel didn’t respond. His eyes were on the mud in front of him. He was thinking quickly but coming up with nothing.

“Hey! Fuck you guys!” Ellie shouted at the top of her lungs.

Catcalls and more laughter followed.

“No le dispares a la mujer! La quiero _viva!_ ” said the leader with the thin voice. He was laughing when he said it, but it sounded sinister to Ellie somehow. The other men hooted and brayed when he said it, whatever it meant.

Joel leaned out quickly and popped off a few shots before returning to cover.

“Manténgalos inmovilizados!” said the first man. “Voy a dar la vuelta!”

“Por qué no lo dices suficientemente alto para que todos oigan?” the third man protested.

“No seas estúpido!” the first man barked at the third. “Esos anglos no saben lo que estamos diciendo! Dije que los mantuvieras inmovilizados!”

Ellie furrowed her brow. Important things were being said and she didn’t understand a word of it. It was pissing her off to no end.

“Joel –“ she began.

“They’re gettin’ ready to come at us,” Joel said. “They’re going to try to keep us pinned down so they can flank us, probably from those trees over there. We’re gonna hafta shoot it out with ‘em. You ready?”

“Tengo hambre, boss,” she answered with determined eyes and a quick, reassuring nod, using the only Spanish words she could recall. Of the handful of phrases that Joel had tried to teach her during this trip, she desperately wished she could remember how to say something other than ‘I’m hungry’ at a moment like this, but it would have to do for now.

Joel returned her nod. “I’m gonna send a few bullets their way. You stay out of sight in the meantime.”

“No way!” she insisted, scrambling through the goopy mud to take a position closer to him, her compact pistol in hand, ready to support, wanting to help, like she always did. “We’re doing this together, dude!”

“Remember the overpass? Where we wrecked the bike? Back in Ohio?” he asked, leaning out of cover just long enough to fire off two shots with his revolver before returning to cover and the conversation with her. “Those guys didn’t know you had a gun. We used it to our advantage, remember?”

“Yeah. Okay. I gotcha,” she nodded. “So what’s the plan?”

“I gotta cover some ground in a minute,” he said, and thumped the side of his fist against the oil pan of the motor by his head. “This old beast will soak up a lot of lead. You stay back here behind the truck and I’ll try to work my way up and around them like I did last time.”

“But couldn’t I -,” Ellie began in protest.

“I need you _here_ ,” Joel insisted. “Now hush up and let me do a quick head count.”

Joel peered out carefully. He could clearly see the big hole in the side of the guardrail where they’d flown off the bridge. The bent metal railing was curled and rusting and the opening was large, probably made by a car or a truck a long time ago. Maybe by the very truck he was now hiding behind.

If that railing didn’t have that big hole busted in it, he thought to himself, we would’ve flipped over the handlebars and into the water and this whole thing would be an even bigger mess.

“Jacobo!” the leader was shouting from his position on the bridge, concealed behind the corroded carcass of an old Dodge Caravan, “Estás sangrando?”

“Vete al infierno, Vicente,” another man barked. His voice had a strained edge to it. He was clearly in pain. His upper arm was badly lacerated, the meat deeply gouged and flayed by a spray of pellets from Ellie’s shotgun.

The leader laughed mockingly. When he spoke, there was the spirit of camaraderie in his words but also a very clear threat. “No me jodas, maricón. Va a estar bien.”

The wounded man came to the edge of the guardrail. Joel could see him through the gap between the truck’s bumper and the edge of the slightly ajar hood. The man’s wounded arm was wrapped in a bandage made from his shirt.

“Oye chica! Donde esta tu?” he called down to the truck below.

“What’s he saying?” Ellie whispered, inching closer to Joel.

“Zorra!” the wounded man shouted. “Tu madre es una _puta!_ ”

The men on the bridge laughed. The howls of the unseen dying man had subsided to low moans that barely carried down to the soaked, mud-caked pair huddling behind the truck on the bank of the river.

“Bad stuff about your mom,” Joel said, trying to judge the distance from the wrecked truck to the concealment of the trees. A long way.

“Fuck that guy!” Ellie hissed. “What an asshole.”

Between the truck and the bridge, Joel could see the tip of his lost shotgun’s stock jutting up from the mud like a walnut brown shark fin. A few feet beyond, the barrel of the hunting rifle stuck out of the water like a metal snorkel. The guns might be recovered, but they would have to be cleaned before they could be fired. All he had was his pistols. He frowned. Nothing about this plan was good.

“I’m gonna have to make a run for those trees over there,” Joel said, indicating the route he would take with his free hand. “You’re gonna have to cover me until I get there.”

Ellie looked. Worry washed over her face as she saw he distance he would have to cover. “All the fucking way over there?! Are you fucking _kidding_ me?”

“No choice,” he said flatly, turning the .45 over in his hand to pass it to her. “We can’t stay here. It’ll work,” he lied as best he could. “They’re all bunched up at the guardrail now. You pin ‘em down and I can make it to the trees then I can sneak up on them.”

Ellie didn’t take the gun. She turned away and shucked off her backpack instead.

“Goddammit, Ellie! I ain’t puttin’ this up for a vote. Take the damn gun!”

“Creo que está recargando!” the first man was shouting to his friends.

“They think I’m reloadin’! C’mon, Ellie!” Joel shoved the Colt at her.

”Wait a second! I got this!” she snapped, small, sure hands digging through her backpack as fast as she could.

_It’s in here. It’s in here! I wouldn’t leave it with the stuff on the bike. I wouldn’t. It’s in here. I know it is!_

“Just a sec!” she pleaded, working as fast as she could.

“Goddammit!” Joel roared, furious with her.

He wheeled round the side of the truck on one knee and began to unload the Colt at the bridge. The men ducked out of sight behind the guardrail and while a pair of his bullets struck the steel railing with loud, ringing sounds, sparking dramatically, the rest of the rounds sailed ineffectively through empty air.

He ducked back into cover to reload, cutting his eyes at Ellie, still mad as hell at the girl. His face quickly reshaped itself into one of unhappy confusion. She had a large can of crushed pineapple in her hands and was fruitlessly trying to open it without a can opener, attempting to unscrew it for some damned reason. He wondered momentarily if she was suffering from a concussion. He’d seen men do stranger things after a good blow to the head. During one of the first home games of his junior year, Joel had seen his friend Aaron Talbot damn near get his lights knocked out on the thirty-five yard line by a defensive lineman the size of a small mountain. When he finally opened his eyes, poor Aaron had stood up, convinced he was at home on the sofa, and tried to see who was knocking at the door. The kids at the school never let poor Aaron live that one down.

Joel pulled a fresh magazine from his pocket, replacing the empty one in the pistol and quickly sent more bullets flying at the men who were now safely in cover, content to wait it out. Joel knew he would have to do something fast before they got too comfortable up there. And a bad plan was better than no plan at all.

Ellie was nudging him as he dumped the spent magazine to swap it for a loaded one. A small black baseball was in her hands. She pushed it into his empty palm once he’d finished slapping the fresh magazine into the grip of the Colt.

“Here,” she said simply. Only that. Nothing more.

The thing was cold in his hand. Metal. Heavy. There were words printed on the side in neatly stenciled white letters.

                    M-67  
           HAND  GRENADE  
          FRAGMENTATION

He had to read it a second time to make sense of it.

“Want to know what else I stole from Bill?” she grinned.

“Te voy a matar!” the wounded man bellowed. A hail of bullets from his automatic rifle hammered into the top of the old truck, singing loudly in a metallic chorus.

Ellie flinched. Joel didn’t. He was smiling.

“Pendejo!” the wounded man shouted defiantly, reloading his rifle. “Pinche puta!”

“Muévete, Desi!” the leader ordered. “No seas marica! Su escopeta se cayó en el agua! Lo vi!”

“Speak English, assholes!” Ellie shouted.

“Fuck you, you little bitch!” the wounded man shouted. The others laughed.

“See? Was that so hard?” Ellie muttered to herself.

“Desi!” the leader shouted. “Carrera!”

Joel handed her the Colt. She accepted it this time.

“Jacobo es el más rápido!” the third man, Desi, protested.

“Chingate, Desi!” Jacobo, the wounded man shouted.

“Jode tu madre ayer noche!” Desi snapped. The first man, who had been silent for this exchange, laughed, enjoying this moment of macho posturing. The dying man, the one Ellie had shot in the stomach, had finally gone silent.

Joel passed her a spare magazine for the gun. She tucked it into the front of her pants.

“Jacobo está herido,” the leader explained. “Haz lo que digo.”

“You following any of that?” Ellie asked, shifting the larger gun to her right hand. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake as before, back at the overpass. Her own lighter pistol was in her weaker, left hand.

“Thiago, ve con Desi.” The voice of the leader barely carried down to them. He was no longer shouting. The men would do what they were told.

“Yeah,” Joel answered, shoving the big revolver into his holster and swapping the grenade into his now empty right hand. “It’s almost time.”

The leader shouted “Dispara! Dispara, cabrón! No dejes que lleguen a los árboles!”

Another long volley of gunfire peppered the truck. The Detroit steel stopped every round. Joel rose to a crouch.

“This is it, Ellie.”

“I got your back, Joel.”

Kneeling behind the buckled and twisted guardrail, Jacobo, the man with the bandaged bicep, began to reload his assault rifle. The muscles of his left arm were pumping out waves of agony that were difficult to ignore. It made his hands clumsy. Reloading was taking longer than normal and this was his last full magazine. Bullets for the rare 6.8mm Remington SPC carbine had always been hard to find and after all these years, they were practically nonexistent. He would have to make these last few bullets count.

From the corner of his eye, he watched his friends, Desi and Thiago, loading fresh bullets into their guns nearby. It would be a long run from the middle of the bridge to the grassy slope at the end and the riverbank below. He and Vicente would have to keep those fuckers behind the truck pinned down. Those two anglos had already killed Facundo and Juan Manuel. Good men both and not losses they could afford. This group had once been much, much larger – a band of soldiers turned hellraisers who had torn up the lands of three nations, from Durango to Calgary, imposing their will on everyone they encountered. Now what had been a fearless, unstoppable army more than fifty strong had slowly been reduced to just a pitiful few bandits carefully preying on only the smallest, weakest groups. And now those gringo assholes hiding behind that old truck had whittled it down to something even smaller. They would have to die.

Vicente fired off the last rounds in his pistol and ducked down to reload. He nodded to the others as he reloaded. It was almost time. As soon has he had reloaded, it would be time to press the attack. Jacobo, still fumbling with the magazine, nodded to Desi. He hadn’t meant the words he’d said before. He was just angry and wounded. Desi returned the nod and a faint smile. It was nothing personal. No grudge. These things happened in battle. They had all known each other since their unit had escaped Mexico during the early, hellish days of God’s final judgment. Twenty years together, in good times and bad. They were family. Brothers fought. Brothers forgave.

Thiago, keeping watch through the gap between the steel strip of the guardrail and the blacktop below, suddenly yelled out, “Ella tiene una pistola!”

The woman had appeared suddenly at the other end of the truck. She wore a fierce mask in place of her pretty face. She was snarling, her teeth bared, framed by full lips. Thiago was already making plans for that sweet mouth of hers. He hoped dearly that she wouldn’t put up so much of a fight that he might be forced to knock out any of her fine white teeth. Breaking a woman’s will so completely that you could make her suck your cock without any fear of her bite was the sweetest part of taming a tough woman like that one down there. It was like breaking a spirited horse only with an even greater reward.

“Cuidado!” Vicente shouted as they all dropped down out of sight.

They hadn’t been sure the woman was still armed. She had dropped her shotgun right before that crazy man sent the red motorcycle flying off the bridge like the sort of daredevil stuntmen that the best sort of movies so exciting. It turned out the woman had two guns, in fact, one for each hand, and she fired them with practiced ease. Keeping a tempo just fast enough to prevent them from sticking their heads up as the bullets whizzed and caromed around them, but not so fast that she exhausted all her ammo so quickly that her suppressing fire would be too brief to be effective. Jacobo admired her skill. He had been a soldier once. He respected people who treated guns like tools and not magic wands that could solve any problem through wishful thinking and dumb enthusiasm. He too looked forward to taming a woman so skilled and dangerous, but he preferred a woman’s ass to her mouth. He smiled at the thought of what was to come. He hoped she had a fine ass. Sometimes white girls had them. It wasn’t too much to hope for that this one might have a plump ass.

“Necesito municiones!” Thiago hissed. The cylinder of his revolver was barely more than half full.

Desi snorted, bemused, huddling close to his friends, and scratched at his flank, feeling his ribs, so prominent beneath the skin. There wasn’t any more ammo to be had. No food either. Or soap. Everyone stunk and pressed so close together only made it that much worse. He tried to remember the last time he’d had a good bath or a good meal but couldn’t. They were running out of everything these days. Hell, he was running out of fingers too, having lost his good hand to an infected cut earlier in the year. But maybe if they could take the woman alive, they’d at least have some sex for a change. He tried to remember the last time he’d sunk his rod in some nice, warm gash. Too damn long ago to think about without becoming sad. He could barely remember the woman’s face, or the name of the town they had found her in. He wished the woman down there behind the truck had bigger tits. Big ones were always fun to slap around and watch them shake and bounce. He vowed to take her alive, even though she and her little tits didn’t deserve it. Why did she have to shoot poor Juan Manuel in the face? That old man was probably the only person who wouldn’t have lined up for a turn with her. Why couldn’t they have just killed the man on the motorcycle quick and clean, and taken his stuff without much of a fight and then had a little fun with the woman and her sweet slit and small tits, like they usually did? Why was everything going so badly today?

“Me cago en la leche,” he muttered, cursing his bad luck, using his long dead father’s favorite idiom, the pistol tucked into the crook of his right arm as he awkwardly reloaded it with his left hand.

Thaigo sniffed and made a face. “Hueles a mierda,” he grinned, teasing his friend.

Desi shook his head. Of course he stank. They all stank. He curled his index finger behind his thumb, making a very tiny circle, the symbol for ‘asshole’, and held it low, where the other man could see. Thiago grinned and Jacobo laughed, barely audible over the ricochets singing against the steel in front of them. Maybe they would share this woman when this matter was done. They had done it before. Two rods in two holes. Or maybe two in the same hole. A train or a sandwich. It usually worked wonders for getting a new woman to know her place in the group.

“Kieta el stupido baboso,” Desi chuckled.

Thiago grinned. “Esto es estúpido y peligroso.” He nodded his chin towards the pretty little redheaded woman below and winked at his friend salaciously. “Abejas que tienen miel tienen aguijón.”

“Mmm. Mi jaina,” Vicente purred lustfully over the din of the girl’s persistent gunshots. This girl was going to be a joy for quite a while. Weeks. Months, maybe. The other men would get their share of her tonight and in the days to follow, but she would be his and his alone tonight.

The fusillade finally abated after several long moments and Vicente, formerly the second sergeant of this outfit and the highest-ranking survivor, began to bark orders. “Desi! Thiago! Corre! CORRE!”

The two men rose, ready to sprint. Jacobo, who had never risen higher in the ranks than corporal but through simple attrition had become the default second in command of these men, went up on one knee, raising his rifle to his shoulder to provide cover fire for his brothers in arms until they either succeeded in their mission or until his ammo ran out.

“Desi! Muévete, bastardo perezoso!” Jacobo exhorted, chiding Desi, hoping to spur him to greater speed than the man was usually capable of. The laughter died in his throat. He peered over the top of his rifle at what he saw below. For a moment, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him.

The crazy gringo was down there, standing in the open, ten feet away from the truck. The stupid motherfucker had tried to cover the distance between the truck and bridge while the girl was shooting. He hadn’t even made it halfway. Jacobo smiled. The mud had slowed him down. This would be an easy kill.

“Que es…” Thiago whispered, the question fading away on his lips. He and Desi had stalled at the sight below, never even beginning their run.

There was something in the gringo’s hand. He was throwing it. Jacobo recognized what it was but his brain refused to accept it.

“No,” Vicente gasped in disbelief. How many years since he had last seen such a thing? Who even had them anymore? No one. They were all gone, used up long ago, just memories now, like the uniform he had once worn with such pride, like the flag of the nation he had defended so proudly, so desperately, obeying every command given to him in an increasingly futile effort to maintain order. He’d obeyed them all, no matter how inexperienced and frightened the rapidly depleting cadre of officers who came to issue the commands became as the army fell apart in what seemed like the blink of an eye. He’d obeyed the instructions, even the ones he found so vile that he’d had to drink himself to sleep in those last days, until the orders from headquarters finally stopped coming and the last words on the radio were those of a terrified woman, a mere sub-lieutenant, the only officer left, trying to make herself heard over the howls of the damned outside the hastily barricaded door of the last military base in Mexico, all hope now lost. ‘Sálvese quien pueda!’, she’d said, just before shooting herself in the head, the radio still broadcasting even after her body fell to the floor with a thump and the monsters outside broke the door down. Every man for himself.

The grenade sailed through the air, dark and small and deadly.

Second Sergeant Vicente Pacheco thought about how unfair life was. They had just gotten the El Camino working this morning. They were leaving soon.

In the fraction of a second given to him before the end, he resolved to stand proudly. He would do nothing else. He was tired. There was no other word for it. Tired. Even surviving was not enough of a prize after all this time when presented at long last with a quick death by a man as crazy and daring as the gringo below. If there had been time, Vicente would have nodded to the man.

“Mierda!” Desi cried, turning to run, having rediscovered his legs much too late.

Everyone but Vicente tried to escape, to scatter, each in a different direction, old combat training telling them to dive for cover, to leap into the river, to get behind something, to get away, to get _anywhere_ , but it was too late.

The grenade exploded in midair, at shoulder level, no more than two feet away from them, directly in front of the sergeant.

From her place behind the tailgate of the overturned truck, Ellie watched the explosion on the bridge, saw the flesh and bone and body parts, more arms and heads than she wanted to count, arc through the clear blue sky, streaming gore in crimson ribbons. She wanted to puke, but she didn’t. The guns in her hands smoked, the slides locked back, chambers empty, ready to be reloaded. She kept what was little was left of her breakfast down in her stomach where it belonged. She needed to remind herself that she was a badass so she stood up and looked to Joel for some measure of reassurance.

Joel had stood his ground, his boots sunk deep into the mud, his eyes on the bridge, the ring he had pulled from the grenade still snug around the knuckles of the index finger on his left hand. He was smiling in a way that made Ellie sad.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ellie gives Joel the gift of high explosives and he doesn’t even say thank you. It may be the most Joel-ish thing I’ve ever written.
> 
> If you happen to have an over/under shotgun, don’t pull both triggers at once. If both barrels go off at the same time, the recoil is brutal. Also, the heat and the pressure of two shells discharging at the same time can warp or explode the barrels and blow off an arm or a face. Don’t try it at home, kids! Ellie only got away with it because she had loaded a shell into just one barrel.
> 
> And at long last, we finally say goodbye to the big red Honda that has carried them so very far across the lush green desolation of post-pandemic America. I’m going to miss that bike. I may even go out and buy one just to have it around. It was a 2011 Honda GL 1800 Gold Wing in case you want one of your own. Metallic candy apple red with silver trim. Five speed transmission. GPS, Sirius Radio, heated seats, the works.
> 
> Big thanks to my buddy Frankie who had no idea why I needed a bunch of lines translated into Spanish. I’m really pleased with the back story I cooked up for the bandits. It’s easy to throw guys into the story just to be bad guys, but in a world like this, you know that everyone you meet has survived horrible things. Some of them might have been heroes once, or, like Joel, might be good guys again given the right circumstances. But it wasn’t in the cards for these guys, I guess. However noble they may have been twenty years ago, they were the worst kind of people now. And they interrupted Ellie recalling the sexy dream she had about Joel, Riley, and herself just as it was getting to the really good stuff. For that alone, they had to die. 
> 
> It was great to finally pay off the mystery of the can of pineapples. I’ve been carrying that bit since the very early days of this story, way back in volume one. Feels good, man.
> 
> And that’s it for this belated chapter. Wow! Did a month really slip by between updates? Damn, this is getting annoying. I was so good about sticking to my schedule for most of this story. What can I tell you? Work is kicking my ass lately. Nevertheless, I hope this installment was worth the wait. Just two more to go until we wrap this volume up. Woo!
> 
> Come back next week for chapter twenty-nine: Blacktop Ellie, Queen of the Highway.


	29. Blacktop Ellie, Queen of the Highway

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three hundred miles to go before they reach Jackson and their motorcycle is lost forever beneath the waters of the North Platte River. Ellie and Joel are going to need a miracle.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 29 – Blacktop Ellie, Queen of the Highway**

 

If only Aaron Talbot could’ve seen that, Joel thought with a strange, grim sort of pride, watching the chunks of meat rain down into the river, making pink, foamy splashes. And Coach McCall too. Best damn pass I ever threw.

“Jesus, Joel,” Ellie said in a hushed voice, squishing her way towards him through the mud, her eyes transfixed by the last, small bits of gore raining down from the bridge. Both pistols were still in her small hands, empty, with thin wisps of smoke drifting up from the locked open slides.

“They weren’t about to let us across that bridge. It was them or us, kiddo,” Joel said. “I picked us.”

“I know,” she said with a small nod of understanding. “It was… a lot grosser than I expected. That’s all.”

“Let’s get up there and make sure we got all of ‘em,” Joel said, his large hand on her shoulder reassuringly. “Keep your eyes open… and your gun out.”

“Okay.”

She handed the large Colt automatic back to him and began to reload her own smaller Beretta while she followed him from the edge of the river, towards the grassy bank and up to the bridge above.

**. . .**

The man was dying, bleeding out, his flesh in tatters. His legs were mangled, gouged but unbroken thigh and shin bones revealed to the daylight where fabric and meat had been sheared away in the explosion. He lay on the bloody, gore strewn blacktop several feet away from where the grenade had gone off. Unlike the other bandits, he’d had the presence of mind to run when he saw the grenade flying towards them. As a result, he was the only survivor. The others had been ripped apart by screaming razors of metal, killed instantly.

He lay on his side, trying to curl his legs up, but the most of the muscles around the knees weren’t there anymore to obey the orders of his brain. He was mumbling something through split lips. A prayer, maybe. A pistol lay nearby. It wasn’t his gun, but it would do. He wanted to kill himself but as the gringo and the redhead approached, he decided to try and kill them too. His fumbling attempts became more frantic and clumsier. The sounds coming from his mouth grew louder and more nonsensical. Pink foam began to collect at the corners of his mouth. The hand fluttering at the grip of the pistol was missing two fingers, carried away by the explosion. The man’s other hand, pressed to his stomach where some shrapnel had become lodged, was gone, the wrist terminating in a scarred and calloused little stump, amputated at some point months or years before. The fingers of the mangled hand couldn’t close around the handle of the pistol. There was another hand already holding the gun, though the owner of that hand was nowhere to be found. The arm with the mystery hand holding the gun ended in a splintered, shredded blossom of gore and bone partway between the wrist and the elbow. There was a tattoo etched into the tanned, ruptured flesh. A name. Maria, maybe. Or Marta. It was hard to say. The ink was faded and only the first three letters remained, the other having been erased along with the skin when the explosion separated the arm and the gun from their owner.

Joel kicked the hand and the gun away with his boot. It was a rusty old revolver, the barrel bent in the blast, the cylinder partially unseated, rendered useless. It skittered and clattered across the slick, bloody blacktop and disappeared over the side of the bridge to be swept away by the river surging along below. The mangled man gave a soft, defeated, wailing groan and let his head drop to the asphalt, defeated. He tried to curl into a ball to cope with the indescribable pain of his looming death but his body wasn’t responding anymore. Joel kept walking, ignoring him, content to let him die. Ellie stopped, her eyes locked with those of the man. One dark eye was a smear of jelly and deflated white casing hanging from a pink socket. It made her think of a half-chewed hardboiled egg. His other eye was intact. It pleaded with her wordlessly, the glimmer of life inside it already growing dim. She raised her pistol and put a single bullet into his head. The sharp report of the shot echoed across the bridge and the river. Joel kept walking, searching the area for anything useful. If he thought what she had done was a waste of ammo, he kept it to himself. The girl had a big heart, and she liked to help, liked to show kindness whenever she could, to anybody she could, even towards a man who probably would have done terrible things to her young body if the battle had gone the other way.

**. . .  
**

She held the largest piece in her hand. Joel was still holding the other chunk. He had been the one to find it. What was left of it, anyway.

“I’m sorry, Ellie. That’s a tough break.”

“Yeah,” she said bitterly. “It sucks.”

The shotgun had been open for reloading when the bullet struck her helmet and she had reflexively dropped the weapon in shock. The bike had been going pretty fast at the time. When the gun hit the asphalt, it must have spun and bounced a hundred times or more. The slightly warped barrels in her hand were bent, the last two inches or so spreading apart at the end in a curving ‘Y’. The walnut foregrip was gone, nowhere to be found. The steel receiver with all the fancy engraving was in Joel’s hand. The metal was badly gouged in several places. The stock, which had been such a perfect fit for her, was broken, reduced to a dangerous mess of wooden splinters. The trigger guard had snapped off and one of the triggers was missing. The other was badly bent. The leather sling Joel had made for her was gone.

She blinked and told herself that those weren’t tears she could feel welling up at the corners of her eyes. Her hair was still wet. It must be river water dripping into her eyes. That’s all it was.

“Fuck,” she said glumly, searching for words she could safely say in front of Joel. Words that wouldn’t make her sound like a sentimental sap. Practical words. The kind of words he would use in a situation like this. “I still had a bunch of ammo for it too. It’s in my backpack.”

“Yeah? Well, maybe you oughta hang on to those shells just the same,” Joel said, giving good, practical advice, just the sort of thing she didn’t want to hear at the moment. “We might find another 28 gauge somewhere. Or maybe we could use them to trade for food or something if we meet anybody nice.”

“There aren’t any nice people anymore,” she sighed, not really meaning the words, but feeling better having said them all the same.

Joel made a noncommittal grunting noise and set the ruined receiver of the shotgun on the rusted orange hood of an old Nissan Sentra. He resumed his search of the bridge. It had been pretty fruitless so far, but now that they were on foot again and most of their supplies were at the bottom of the river, he couldn’t afford to miss anything useful.

**. . .**

Ellie stood at the edge of the bridge, where the big hole in the guardrail was, the place where the Gold Wing had taken to the sky for a few moments of flight before it drowned.

She leaned forward on the balls of her muddy feet and peered over the side, at the water dancing down there. Somewhere under the dark surface, the Honda that had carried them so far from that parking lot in West Virginia was settling into its final resting place.

_Her name was Kristi Chau… But that wasn’t her bike. Hers was smaller. I saw her bike in the picture she had on the key chain. The picture was taken before she cut her long hair short. The big bike we rode all this way belonged to her husband, Tracy… No, that’s not right… Terry. His name was Terry. She lost him somewhere… maybe the same place she lost her own bike… But she rode his bike… Rode it for years… Until she got bit and Joel put her down…. He said it was a merciful thing to do… But he didn’t put down that guy back there. He just walked on by and left him to die… and I guess he deserved it… Kristi didn’t… I bet Terry didn’t either… We took her bike and I took her shotgun, the one she got in Winnipeg. That’s what it said on the side of the gun, anyway. ‘Wings Over Winnipeg’… Skeet shooting. Ladies division. She got second place… I read those words every time I cleaned the gun… I tried to take good care of it, just like she did… Maybe I’ll go to Winnipeg one day, see what it’s like up there… Now her bike’s gone... Her gun’s gone… Nobody to remember her but us… well, me. Joel doesn’t care. Once you’re dead, it’s like you never existed to him… But I won’t forget… I promise I won’t, Kristi… We never would have made it this far without your bike… and your shotgun… and that cool denim jacket… fuck, that’s gone too. It got all torn up back at Fort Overpass. Her ‘Tim Horton’ shirt too… Fuck. It’s all gone, isn’t it?_

She sighed loudly and stepped away from the edge. Joel was still searching the bridge. She knew she should help too. She dropped the broken pieces of the shotgun into the water and jogged across the bridge to join her partner. She wiped her eyes once, quickly, when he wasn’t looking, before she got too close to see the river water on her cheeks.

**. . .**

The men hadn't been using the bridge as a campsite. There was none of the detritus one would expect to find where people were habitating for any length of time.

“Bupkis,” she said grumpily, shoving her empty hands into her jeans pockets.

Joel snorted once in amusement. The strange assortment of words this girl knew. She was a reader alright.

”Yeah,” he agreed. “We didn’t find squat. But they were using this place as a trap. That means that they walked here every day from somewhere. And nobody likes a long commute to work. So I bet they probably came from that rest stop up the road.”

“You think there’s more of them?” Ellie asked, anticipating another firefight now, keenly feeling her the absence of her shotgun.

“Probably not,” Joel said. “That place ain’t but a thousand yards from here, just on the other side of those trees.” He pointed with his hand in the direction of the rest area to the west. “If there were any more of them, I reckon they would have heard the noise, came runnin’, and dropped the hammer on us by now for what we did to their buddies.”

“Oh,” Ellie said with visible relief. “Good. I’ve had enough thrills for one day.”

“All the same,” Joel said, “if that’s where they were camped, they might have some supplies there we can use.”

He picked up the shotgun and the rifle from where he had left them to rest on the trunk of an old Toyota, the side of which was peppered with little holes from a mix of shotgun pellets and shrapnel.

“Do you wanna check the rest area first? Or should we see if we can get anything from the bike before we make the walk over there?”

“You’re asking me?” she said, surprised and pleased by this gesture.

“Sure,” he said. “You ain’t the navigator no more. So the way I see it, you gotta do _somethin’_ to pull your weight on this team, right? Don’t want me thinkin’ you’re a slacker, do you? So give me your input, Cadet Williams.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” she grinned, saluting crisply. “I vote we send a dive team down to locate the crashsite and search for supplies.”

“Dive team?” he said with a bemused raised eyebrow.

“I’ll supervise the efforts of the frogmen from my command post on the shore,” she said, trying to pull her lips down over her big smile and not succeeding at it.

**. . .**

Joel came up for air. It had been his third attempt to get to the submerged bike and it was going to be his last. He was worn out. Any more diving down there would be dangerous.

“Any luck?” Ellie called from the bank, the shotgun slung from her narrow shoulders, the rifle in her hands. He had taken the scope off until he could sight it in again. Probably knocked out of alignment, he had told her. They would have to manage with iron sights for a while.

“Nope,” Joel called, fording his way through the chest deep water just off the shore, in the shadow of the bridge. “The damn water’s too deep and the current is too fast.”

“I was wondering why you keep coming up all the way over there. I know the bike can’t be under the stupid bridge.”

He was breathing hard and he took comically large steps through the deep water. It was only up to his waist now. He arms rippled and flexed as he walked. The hair on his naked chest was matted down with water.

_You should go shirtless all the time, dude._

“Yeah, it’s pullin’ me downstream,” he was saying. “Wearin’ me out.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked, hoping if she squinted in the bright sunlight he wouldn’t be able to see how she was staring at the muscles in his chest and stomach working as he moved closer to shore.

“And it’s half sunk in the mud down there,” he said. “I can see it, but I can’t stay under long enough to get to it. The current keeps carryin’ me away.”

The water was mid-thigh deep to him. His legs looked amazing to her, rippling and powerful, glinting in the light.

_You should go around in nothing but your underwear all the time, dude._

“Well, fuck,” Ellie said, squinting even harder so she could get away with looking at the shape of his man parts and how his wet boxer briefs clung to them in ways that were indescribably interesting to her. “I mean, I know you did your best and shit happens and all that stuff. But I’m really gonna miss the chess set. You know?”

She watched it move from side to side behind the wet blue cotton as he walked.

_Left… right… left… right… Oh God, please don’t let him catch me looking… left… right…_

“I’m going to miss all that ammo,” he said, smiling. “The food too.”

He trudged out of the river and onto the shore, his soaked body making a waterfall as he walked.

He’d taken his clothes off after the second failed attempt to reach the bike in an effort to make the swimming as easy as possible. But it wasn’t enough of an edge. Ellie, for her part, was still caked in mud. It was slowly drying in the warm daylight. She wanted to get out of her stiffening clothes. She wanted to be in her underwear with him.

“You know what we should do?” she asked as he crossed the shore and the muddy dozen yards or so separating him from her.

“What’s that?” he asked, stopping in front of her, pushing his wet hair back and crossing his arms over his chest. It made his biceps look even bigger and for a second, Ellie almost lost her train of thought.

“Um… Oh! We should swim!” She grinned. “Whaddya think? Good plan?”

“You can’t swim,” he pointed out dryly, which struck her as an ironic thing for a soaking wet man to do.

“You can teach me! I can get in my underwear and you can teach me to swim today! It’s a pretty fucking great plan, if I say so myself,” she nodded smugly at this. “You’re welcome, in fact.”

“That water’s no good for swimmin’ lessons, girl,” Joel replied, turning slightly at the waist to nod with his chin at the river behind him. “I’m a good swimmer and that shit was challengin’ for me. I try to teach you to swim in that mess and you’ll get carried down the river again. You want to spend another day traipsin’ naked through the woods while I go lookin’ for you?”

“I’ll have my underwear on this time. That’ll make all the difference!” she snickered.

“Another time, squirt.” He patted her arm affectionately and moved past her to the grassy part of the shore, where his clothes were spread out and waiting.

_No! Don’t put your clothes on yet! Say something, Ellie! Make him stop!_

“Joel! Wait!” she began, hustling after him, getting in front of him, turning to face him, trying to stall him.

He slowed his pace but didn’t stop.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Umm… uhh…” she stammered.

_Fuck! Help me, Bad Ellie! What do I say?!_

_Tell him “I like how your junk looks in that wrapper, you sexy manbeast!”_

_No! Not helping, Bad Ellie!_

“What?” he said, almost to his pants. His mud-caked pants. His junk concealing pants. His damned pants that if she’d had any sense whatsoever would have been thrown into the river and then she’d have told him an eagle swooped down and carried them away to the mountains.

“I…uh…”

_Fuck! No choice! I gotta be honest! I was hoping it wouldn’t come to that!_

“I really like how you look in your dive team uniform, Captain Miller. I think you should keep wearing it for the rest of the day.”

She looked up at him sheepishly but grinning crazily, her eyes filled with hope.

“You told me I had to start making decisions. So there’s one for you,” she said. “Seriously, dude. It _really_ suits you. It’s a good look for you.”

_He’s going to kill me but I don’t care. I had to say it._

He studied her face for a second or two, trying to see if a punchline was coming or not.

She reined in her lunatic grin just a little and let her eyelids slide down to conceal half of her eyes, hoping that she looked more seductive than crazy now.

_Don’t be a wuss, Good Ellie. Tell him “your junk’s making me horny as hell”. Do it!_

“I mean it,” she said, in her best approximation of a sexy purr. “It’s like Lil’ Joel is teasing me with his awesomeness. You and him and all your muscles are conspiring against me to make me think all sorts of stuff right now.”

_Lick your lips! He’ll think it’s sexy! It’ll let him know you’re hot for him!_

Her pink tongue darted out to moisten her plump red lips but she lost her nerve. She pulled it back in halfway through the swipe and tugged her lower lip in, holding it between her teeth instead. She stared up at him. They had had stopped walking. His pants were within reach but he made no attempt to pick them up. She tucked one foot behind the other and tried to look as cute and fetching as a young teenager caked in mud and with damp hair matted around her face can look.

“Is that a fact?” he said huskily, his hazel eyes drawing her green gaze deep into his stare.

“Oh hell yes,” she enthused. “I’m convinced that you are trying to hypnotize me with that thing.”

One corner of his mouth eased itself up into a sexy, lopsided smile. She giggled girlishly and hated the sound she made. It sounded very enticing to him. She wanted to be cooler. He wanted her to be older. They would just have to play this game with the cards they had been dealt.

“Well, now I ain’t so sure you’re seein’ him on his best day,” Joel teased. “That water was mighty cold, you know.”

Ellie had heard one of the girls in the day room of the dormitory make a joke about a guy coming out a cold shower – all the showers in the dorms were cold – but she couldn’t remember what the joke was. All the girls had laughed about the poor sap, but she hadn’t been paying attention at the time. Riley laughed, so she did too. She didn’t care about dumb boys and their boy problems back then but now she regretted not paying more attention to the all the talk about boys that went on in the day room of the senior girl’s floor of Dorm T1.

“Looks pretty good to me,” she said, wishing she could make herself stop grinning. She could see it outlined so clearly in the clingy blue cotton, an intriguing bulge between his legs all snug protruding and shining wetly in the sun, a shape that was so alien and different from anything she had known and it called to her, bewitching her with its overwhelming male Joel-iness. “Really good.”

“You know,” Joel said as casually as he had ever said anything, “it occurs to me that maybe I’d be better of takin’ these wet drawers off before I put my jeans back on.”

Ellie held her breath. Her entire body had gone stiff. Joel narrowed his eyes but she didn’t see the way he was sizing her up: like she was a tasty little animal inching closer to a snare he had set in the woods, with his cock as the bait. Her eyes were focused on just one thing, and it wasn’t anywhere near his eyes.

“What do you think?” he asked, one big hand coming up to squeeze her arm. “I think this is a decision you ought to make.”

“Okay,” she agreed in a tiny squeak.

“Okay, you’re going to make the decision? Or okay… what?” he chided softly. He could feel her trembling just a little.

“Okay, you should take them off,” she said in a voice no louder than the water flowing behind them. She licked her lips, then licked them again. Her eyes were fixated on him, and not the parts of him anywhere near his face.

“I think maybe _you_ should take them off,” he husked, squeezing her small shoulder gently with his large hand. “But that’s up to you, I suppose.”

She giggled breathily, almost vibrating, stepping in place, her wet shoes squishing in the grass, her body filled with too much energy to stand still. Her eyes darted up to his, then back to his underwear, then back to him again.

“You’re serious?” she peeped, her voice so high she wanted to die from embarrassment but not until she’d seen Lil’ Joel in the full light of day. One very good look and the mystery would be solved and she could keel over dead and Joel could float her down the river to her eternal rest, a smile frozen forever on her face.

He nodded once, a crazy sexy smile on his face, and Ellie’s stomach began to do flip-flops, but the good ones this time, not the kind that made you spew inside your motorcycle helmet and why was she thinking about barf at a time like this?

She opened her mouth. No words came out. She giggled jubilantly instead. She pulled both lips into her mouth to try and stop the sound.

His voice was low, with lots of that deep timbre that drove her absolutely crazy.

“Whaddya say? Wanna help me out of these wet things?”

She nodded enthusiastically, almost cartoonishly, sure that if she released her lips from the clamps of her teeth she would cackle and dance and flap her arms and hop in circles around him like the biggest idiot who ever held the cure for mankind in a body that was about to burst from pent up excitement. The bitter loss of the shotgun and the motorcycle was gone from her mind now.

“Go on then,” he said in that low rumbly way that always made her blood push through her veins in a thick, hot flow.

She hooked her quavering thumbs in the waistband of his underwear, just over each of his narrow hips, bending her body at the knees and the waist a bit, lowering herself before him.

She swallowed, grinned, and let out a deep breath that she’d been holding in without realizing it.

She began to work the elastic down. Slowly. Not like she had planned to take off her own underwear a few hours ago, back when they still had the motorcycle and she was standing on the side of the road while he sat astride the big red Honda, confident like he was the only man in the world who could ever make her feel so crazy and wonderful, looking at her while she stood there with her tits out and her jeans upzipped, wanting to show him her the most private places of herself, but she had chickened out. The underwear had remained in place until he smiled kindly and told her to put her shirt back on and get on the back of the bike. She had wanted to protest. To tell him that she just needed another minute to work up the nerve, but she hadn’t. As soon as he offered her a way out, she had jumped at it, zipping up her jeans, working her shirt back on, and shoving her arms through the straps of her pack before climbing up to the familiar spot behind him. She had wussed out. She wouldn’t do that again. This time the underwear were coming right the fuck off. She had courage to spare now. It wasn’t her underwear at stake this time.

She pulled them lower, in no hurry, nervous and curious, excited, bunching the blue cotton into wet bands around his body. She was whispering “oh man oh man oh man” like a mantra.

Lower still. She could see his thick, dark pubic hair ringing the base of his barely revealed shaft. She was breathing faster.

Lower. Almost all of the shaft was out, the head still trapped inside the elastic, the rest of the length of it pressed against his balls by the elastic band. Her eyes were wide, taking in every detail.

Lower. The head popped loose, the entire shaft was free but the balls were still held down. It bobbed a bit, drawing her eyes to it. She was down on one knee and didn’t know how she got there.

Lower. This was his dick. It was in her face, balls and all. It wasn’t hard. It was soft, dangling, sort of floppy. The balls, now completely exposed, hung in their sack. The shape of them made her think of eggs.

Lower. The underwear was a twisted belt of cotton around his thighs now. Moving faster. Past his knees. His legs were hairy. His balls were hairy too. But not the shaft. It was smooth, with little veins visible here and there. The head had a cute helmet shape, the edges of it flared out. It reminded her of Darth Vader. There was a little hole at the tip.

Lower. All the way down, around his ankles now. She wasn’t looking at his feet. Her eyes were still on the head and his little hole. He peed from that hole. She learned that in health class. His semen came out of that hole too. Lots of stuff going on with that little hole.

He stepped out of his wet underwear, and they lay discarded and forgotten in the grass. Ellie’s hand were clasped in front her, between her thighs. She watched it dangle and swing about slightly as he shifted his weight from one big foot to the other, steadying himself with one hand on her shoulder.

_It’s not hard. But I didn’t know it would be so floppy. It gets bigger when it’s hard. That’s what the instructor said in class. All the girls giggled when he said it. Joel's seems pretty big to me. How big can these things get, I wonder?_

“Thanks, Ellie,” he said, not stepping back, keeping it close to her face so she could get a good look at it. “Feels good to get out of those wet things.”

“Welcome,” she said breathlessly, transfixed.

He chuckled and let her kneel there, eyes wide, mouth agape, without teasing her.

“I’m just gonna look for a while…” she whispered, “if that’s okay.”

“It is. Take your time.”

She tilted her head subtly, trying not too gawk, but wanting to see it from every angle.

“It’s so…” she began.

_Silly looking._

“Cute,” she finished.

_Silly. But cool. I bet I could look at this all day if he’d let me. But he’s going to think I’m a goof if I don’t get up and play it off. I gotta be cool, like I’ve seen these things a bunch of times before._

_But I don’t want to get up! I want to keep looking! I want to… I want…_

“Thanks,” he said, smiling warmly down at her. There was something so endearingly innocent about how she studied it.

“I want to touch it,” she said suddenly.

_Oh fuck! Why did I say that out loud? What if he says no?_

_Oh God! What if he says yes?_

“Alright. If you want. But only a little bit. Don’t get carried away.”

Her heart was in her throat. She could feel it pounding in her ears.

She reached up tentatively. Nervous breathing. Smiling lips. Dry mouth. Shimmering eyes.

Her fingertips closed around it. He smiled. She grinned, looked up at him, sharing an unspoken moment, and returned her gaze to the thing she was gently holding.

It was soft, but kind of firm too. Warm. The skin was like velvet, especially around the head. Not at all what she expected. She had figured that it would feel… manly. Thick. Coarse. Rough, maybe. But it was so super soft. She lifted it up on a platter made of her fingers and palm, and studied it closely, fascinated by this part of him.

Joel watched her examining it intently with her emerald eyes. Her face was so solemn, so serious. At yet there was lust in her eyes too, peeping out from behind the more obvious curiosity. She was very interested in it, and for more than one reason.

“You like it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “It’s… neat… It’s very… you know… _manly_.”

He chuckled and brushed her bangs behind her ear. She almost purred as he briefly, gently, rubbed her round cheek with the heel of his palm.

“Joel…” she began, but didn’t finish the sentence.

“What is it, beautiful?” he asked, noticing how she smiled and taking in all the details of her face when she did. She was so very pretty, this girl.

“Can I… um… touch your… balls?” she asked, forcing out the last word through a tight throat.

“Be gentle,” he said. “Not kiddin’. They’re sensitive.”

“ _I know_ ,” she said, wanting to look up but too shy to do so. “Duh. I’ve kicked enough boys in their balls to know about that these things can’t take a hard punch worth a fuck.”

Joel tried very hard not to think about how casually she had dropped that little nugget of knowledge. He tensed when her other hand came up to cup him, a reflex on his part. This was a greater act of trust on his part that he suspected she could fully appreciate.

She noticed the muscles in his stomach go rigid as the palm of her left hand contacted his ball sack. She wanted to say something reassuring but she was too mesmerized by the weight of his balls as she lifted them, hefting them, feeling them, hot and round and somewhat heavy in her hand. The shape of each one was easy to see in the thin skin encasing them. They hung lower than she thought they would. One seemed to hang a little lower than the other. Girls with big boobs had the same problem. One tit was always a little higher or lower than the other. She hadn’t known it was the same way with boys and their balls. The cartoon graffiti the students spray painted on the walls of the alley behind the dorm always depicted boy parts as an enormous, baseball bat shaped shaft and two really big, perfectly round balls underneath, tucked up good and tight against the bottom of the boner, like bowling balls and a bowling pin. The balls in front of her hung lower than she had expected, and he didn’t have a boner at all. It was soft, but she thought that maybe it was just a little firmer now than it had been when she first touched it. Didn’t these things get hard all at once? Could it happen slowly? Did these things work like that? She didn’t think so, but maybe she would learn otherwise today.

“Is this okay?” she asked, cradling his nuts in one hand while holding his wiener in the other. “I’m not hurting you or anything, right?”

“You’re doing fine. You wanna keep lookin’ at everything?”

“I sure do,” she enthused, white teeth nibbling at her plump bottom lip.

_It’s almost like a hotdog._

She remembered watching Cherry Jackson give pointers to Riley about how to give the best blowjobs for Montego, Riley’s new boyfriend. Cherry had used a dark pink hot dog to demonstrate. She would do something to the hot dog and then Riley would take her own hot dog and repeat the trick. Thirteen-year-old Ellie had found the whole thing silly, like everything concerning boys. But when Riley had teased her about being scared of boys and their dumb wieners, Ellie had snatched up a hot dog from the big box of them in the refrigerator and proceeded to do everything to that stupid, salty, floppy piece of meat that Cherry and Riley did. It had seemed dumb at the time but now, here by the Platt River, more than a year since that summer afternoon in the big walk-in refrigerator at the back of the mess hall, Ellie wished she could find a way to get back to Cherry and thank her for the lessons.

_I’m gonna put your jedi training to good use, Master Cherry. I won’t let you down._

In her left hand, Joel’s balls began to draw up towards his body. The skin of his scrotum was becoming taut and thicker, somehow.

“Oh! How are you doing that?” she asked, grinning at the magic trick he was performing.

He chuckled.

“Get hard!” she said excitedly, wiggling it about, looking up at him in adoration. “I wanna see it hard! You know, compare and contrast and stuff.”

“I’m doing my best to keep that from happenin’, to tell the truth,” he said, looking down at her from on high, the twin hills of his hairy pecs partially blocking out his face, the sky bright and blue behind his face.

“Why? Don’t do that!” she protested. “I’m doing science down here! I need to study this elusive beast in its natural habitat. I’m doing important work in the field of wiener sciences!”

He laughed and it delighted her, a deep booming sound that made his dick twitch in her hand and his balls draw up just a little more. “Did you just sit around readin’ textbooks and stuff all day in that school? Is that where you get all these notions?”

“National Geographic,” she smiled up at him slyly. “I had a big stack of them.”

He laughed again.

_He’s totally naked and I’m down here fully dressed and looking at his junk and he’s acting like this is no big deal._

_Fuck! Teach me how to be this damn cool, Joel._

She waggled the soft member in her hand, moving it from side to side, up and down, trying to figure out how to get it started.

“C’mon! How do you work this thing?!” She giggled then leaned close and spoke encouragingly to it, like you might with a puppy you were trying to train. “C’mon, Little Joel. You can do it! Get hard! Get hard for Dr. Ellie. C’mon, boy!”

“Jesus,” he laughed. “Okay, I think that’s enough for one day.”

“No!” she giggled and tightened her grip. “You’re not getting away until I’ve completed my research! I’m going to lose my grant money if I come back empty handed!”

“D-damn, Ellie,” he laughed. It was a good belly laugh, the kind she so rarely heard from him. “What the hell am I gonna do with you, girl?”

She cackled. He tried to take a step back but she shrieked playfully and grabbed it with both hands. It stretched out an inch or two as she pulled at it, getting longer but thinner as it did so. For a moment she was afraid she might be hurting him but he continued to laugh and seemed unconcerned with how she was stretching his poor, soft wiener out of shape. Her eyes were wide with wonder, clear white showing all around the pretty green.

_Maybe it’s made from the same kind of skin as my pussy lips? They can stretch pretty far too and it doesn’t hurt. Heck, it can feel pretty good if you do it at the right time._

He was laughing but there was an edge to it. He tried to step away from her, his hands on her shoulders to keep her from falling over with it still clutched in her fists.

“No! Come back!” she cackled, holding on for dear life. “Gimme! Dr. Williams hasn’t completed her thesis!”

“Okay, okay!” he laughed, rumbling, naked, sexy, cool.

He stepped closer, putting an end to the stretching, but she didn’t let go. She held on to it with both hands. The head of it bulged out from the confining ring of her hands. It was pointed right at her, round and bulbous, sort of like the tip of a balloon being squeezed. His balls were tight, round orbs beneath the base of the shaft at the other end of the little hands that held him captive. She could see his big sack under the small amount of shaft protruding from her fists. She bumped his balls with the side of her hand as he settled into place. They were drawn too close to his body to swing from side to side anymore. The trapped head of his dick emerging from the ring of her fist was turning a nice shade of purple, drawing her eyes to it and its neat little hole again. She squeezed it just a little tighter, making it inflate a little more and darken in its color.

He grunted affectionately, laughing a little. “Jesus. Easy, girl. _Easy_.”

“Oh! Sorry!” She let go suddenly, letting it flop free, her hands flying away from him, worried sick she had hurt him, tucking her fingers between the muddy thighs of her jeans as she leaned back on her heels, giving him a little room. “Shit! I’m sorry, Joel. I’m sorry! I was just playing. Didn’t mean to…”

It was getting harder, longer, thicker.

“… play so rough,” she finished, her voice fading away.

It was hard. All the way hard.

Big. Long. Thick. With no one to hold it, it twitched a little. It stood straight out from his body. The head continued to swell and flare out as she stared at it. The skin of his sack was almost puckered it was so tight. Veins appeared along the length of his dick, bulging, racing with excitement. All of it, balls and shaft and head, darkened in color. The balls were larger than they had been earlier. She was sure of it. The hole in the tip was like the barrel of a gun and she was staring down it. It glistened in the sunlight, a single drop of something clear right there at the edge of the opening.

She had to remind herself to blink.

It wasn’t silly looking anymore.

“oooh” she sighed, like the coo of a little bird.

It was right in front of her face. She could feel the heat coming off of it, radiating through the air from the bulbous tip of his big cock to the freckled tip of her button nose.

Joel didn’t say a word. He just placed his hands on his hips and let her stare.

It was the most intriguing thing she had ever seen.

**. . .**

“We’re gonna need to do an inventory as soon as we get a chance,” he was saying. “Find out just what we’ve got to work with.”

“Sure, Joel. Sounds good,” she said brightly, slightly in awe of the man walking in front of her. She was grinning. She couldn’t stop grinning. She didn’t care that her clothes were stiff, filthy, caked with mud. Her feet squished inside wet socks and shoes. She didn’t mind that either. She kept grinning as they walked. She was almost skipping.

_Like it was nothing. Like it was no big deal at all. How the fuck does he do that?_

“We got lucky that we found those cans in the mud,” he said, bits of dirt flaking off his boots with each step, leaving a trail of crumbs along I-80, marking their passage all the way back to the bridge. “Good thing you spotted ‘em.”

“Eh,” Ellie said as nonchalantly as she was capable of even though she felt that the next strong breeze would carry her aloft and sent her floating up into the clouds like a heart-shaped balloon, like the pictures she’d seen in a drugstore somewhere, a gift for that ‘special someone’. She shrugged; her arms slightly out from her side, dancing discretely as she walked behind the man she loved. “Spotted it. Tripped over it. Same thing, pretty much. I’m like a bloodhound. I don’t question how I get such amazing results. It’s a gift, really.”

He barked a short laugh. He was in a good mood. It hadn’t been a total loss at the bridge. When the big satchel had flown off the bike along with the rifles, a few of the cans had fallen out and landed in the mud before the river swallowed the satchel and carried it away. Ellie had stumbled across the first of the scattered cans, assuring them at least a few meals. Best of all, all but one of the cans had been filled with meat of one sort of another, and that was the vital on the trail. There were more calories in a can of meat than in six cans of most vegetables. They wouldn’t go hungry for a while.

He smiled at that. It could have gone a lot worse back there.

And the girl sure seemed to enjoy the sight of my cock, he thought with no small amount of pride. So this day wasn’t a total washout.

He’d let her look, going at her own speed, almost making a game of it. It had put her at ease and helped her to get over the loss of the bike and her gun too. She was a sensitive soul. She was tough, resilient, but she also took so much to heart. Ellie was punky, kind, and pretty. She would be easy to fall in love with.

He pushed that though out of his head. The world wasn’t fit for that sort of thinking anymore. And even if it was, she deserved better than him. If he kept her around too long, she’d become more and more like him. She’d wind up like Tess, probably. Tough. Cold. Only warm when there was liquor and a full moon. Ellie had a big heart. He didn’t want to see it shrivel up. If she stuck with him past Jackson, he’d just fuck her up, he was certain of it. Maybe they could have a little fun in the meantime… so long as he didn’t let it go too far… so long as she was still a virgin when he passed her off to Tommy… he couldn’t take that from her, not at his age, not when she was so young… He shouldn’t be doing half the things they were doing now… but she wanted to experiment… and so long as things between them were kept at a simmer, maybe it wouldn’t be too bad for her. She might even learn a few things.

Anything you teach her, she’ll do, his cock whispered to him. _Anything_.

Would you suck my cock, Ellie? he wondered. Would you let me put it in your mouth? Lord knows I want to, though I know damn well I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t have played with your sweet little snatch either. Damn, why do I have such a hard time controlling myself around you? You’re fourteen, for Christ’s sake. Why do I want to fuck you so damn bad?

He looked about, checking for bad guys, his thoughts still on the girl. The way ahead was clear. His thoughts were clear too, and he regretted not having more self-control regarding the girl.

I’m gonna make you the best little cocksucker ever, girl. I think you’ll like that. And I hope when you’re older, you’ll forgive me for being so damn weak.

Ellie was following along behind, stepping lightly, dancing almost. He glanced back, her eyes met his. She smiled. He returned the expression.

_I played with his dick! Oh man, I played with his dick! I still can’t believe it!_

_Then he patted me on the head! Patted me on the fucking head! He’s such an ass! He let me look at his thing… I’m on my knees and it’s in my face… and then…he just pats me on the head and then puts on his clothes while I watched and stood there like an idiot._

_Why didn’t he ask me to do something with it? Kiss it or rub it or suck it or something? Fuck, if he had been down between my legs I would have wrapped my damn legs around his head!_

_Why did he want me to see it but not do anything with it? Does he think I’m too young still? Is he still hung up on that? It was so big and hard! I thought that meant that boys were ready to do that sort of stuff? Sex stuff! Isn’t that what it means when it’s hard! Am I over thinking this? Did I do something wrong? Did he send me a sign and I missed it? Was I just supposed to jump on it? Start jerking him off? Or lick it? Or what?_

_FUCK! THIS IS GOING TO DRIVE ME CRAZY!!!_

His ass looked great in his jeans and she watched how it moved as he walked but the pleasing sight could not distract her from the new path her mind was going down.

_What are you thinking, Joel? Don’t just smile at me! Did you like it? Did you not like it? Are we going to do more stuff like that tonight? Tomorrow? Ever again? Can I get naked with you next time? I promise I won’t chicken out again. I’ll fucking take my clothes off. I won’t back out. I’ll get naked with you. Do you want me to? I do! Can we? I’ll show you mine. You can look at it all you want. We can just be naked together. Okay? Or did I fuck it up? Is that it? I didn’t mean to! I don’t know what I’m doing! I never even saw one up close until today. Just pictures. Drawings, pretty much. In health class. I watched Riley give Montego a blowjob on the dorm roof a few times but it was really dark and I was on the other side of the roof and I couldn’t really see much. She didn’t know. She would have beaten me to death if she found out I was sneaking up there before her and her boyfriend just so I could watch. I was jealous of him. And curious. Sex is mysterious, you butt head. Don’t judge me! I’m doing the best I can. I sucked off a hotdog once. Is that what I was supposed to do when you showed it to me? Was I supposed to suck it? Why didn’t you say something? I would have! Riley teased me for a month after that day in the mess hall. She said she said she was going to take me up to the boys on the sixth floor and charge ten bucks a go. She said I was a natural. A pro! She said I’d make her rich. I got the whole damn hotdog down my throat without puking, Joel! I swear I did! Just give me a chance! You’re bigger than a hotdog, but a wiener is a wiener. I can do it!_

She looked at the sky, but no help was coming with this particular problem. She looked around instead. It was a beautiful day in Wyoming, one filled with blue skies, white, clouds, green grass, and purple-headed ding-dongs.

She sighed, happy but frustrated.

The blue sign on the roadside read simply:

          REST AREA

Beneath the words was a picture of a cartoon guy in a wheelchair and another picture of a couple sitting at a picnic table.

Ahead, Joel slowed his pace and stooped into a semi-crouch as they moved off the highway towards the rest stop.

“Keep your eyes open,” he said, lowering his voice, looking back to make sure she was ready. The shotgun slipped from his shoulder to his hand.

She lifted the rifle up and nodded to him. The gun was a little too big for her, but she would manage. She was tough. If anybody was hiding over there, they were about to get kicked in the dick.

**. . .**

The Fort Steele Rest Area was a strange collection of looping roads, all knotted together in a way that made no sense to Ellie. It was a picnic ground, Joel had told her, not a town. It was supposed to be scenic, not sensible.

There were old buildings here, most of them having long ago fallen in on themselves. A few were old, so old that they had been old when the rest of the world had been a safe, normal place to live. Plaques marked them as historic sites, places where the transcontinental railroad had first connected the country. Soldiers had been posted here, a century ago, to defend the trains from Indian attacks. It must have been an exciting, dangerous place to be back then. Then it became a roadside destination along the highway. A place to pull over for a while, enjoy a picnic, spend some time stretching your legs. A safe place with a rich history. But that was before the pandemic. Now it was dangerous again.

The sagging but still standing central building had been where most of the placards and pictures were kept, a place to read up on the history of this area. Now it was a dusty, dirty shithole of a home. Six filthy, disgusting bedrolls on the floor. Sid dead men back at the bridge. This big room had served as their base for a long time, judging from the amount of garbage strewn across the floor and crammed into every corner, but nobody was coming home tonight. Ellie thought about the man she had shot in the head as he lay dying on the bridge and wondered which of the nasty, crusty tangles of sheets and blankets had been his. She adjusted the leather strap on her shoulder. The rifle was heavy.

“Nothin’,” Joel groused, upending the last of the few containers in the room. “Nothin’ but clothes grubbier than ours and mess of spent brass and empty cans. These bastards were livin’ hard, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah,” Ellie said. “Does anybody out here have it good? It can’t all be this shitty, can it?”

“Pretty much all shitty,” Joel said, his hands on his hips, surveying the room for anything he might have missed. “It wasn’t too bad for a while there, back before everything got picked cleaned and all the easy depots and stashes got played out. But nowadays, if you ain’t in one of the QZ’s that are still standin’ or one of the few outlaw strongholds like Burlington or Hawkesbury, then yeah, it’s gonna be tough.”

“Well, we’re doing okay, I think,” she said, trying to sound hopeful.

“We’ve been real lucky, Ellie,” he said. “And we’ve only been outside Boston for maybe a month or so. Ain’t gonna lie to you, Red. It’s gonna get worse the longer we’re on the road.”

Ellie thought about that for a minute.

“It’s only been a _month?_ Is that all?” She pursed her lips and studied the dirty floor, running a list of recent events through her head. “Seems longer, I guess.”

“We smuggled you out of the city on September 20th,” he said, accidentally acknowledging the existence of Tess indirectly. Ellie caught it but said nothing as he pressed on. “And we made it to Burlington on October 10th… That’s right, yeah?”

“That’s what the calendar in that hillbilly’s garage said,” she said. “Ken? Wasn’t that his name?”

“We’ve made camp seven or eight times since then,” Joel said, ignoring her question. “That means it’s probably the 17th or 18th by now. So yeah, it’s been more or less a month since we set out on this little errand.”

“Shit,” she said softly, looking around the room, replaying the trip in her head. “We’ve been through so much shit. I guess I thought it had been longer, you know?”

“It ain’t gonna let up neither,” he said with a grim sigh. “It ain’t easy out here, girl. You’ve seen how it is.”

“Yeah,” she said, gripping the sling of the rifle, an unconscious gesture of how important guns had become to her now. “I guess I have.”

“Better to find a safe place and hole up there if you can. Being outside the walls, any walls, is dumb and dangerous and a good way to cash in your chips. It’d be faster just to eat a gun and get it over with than to try to live on the road anymore. I gotta get you someplace safe, and soon.”

“Aww,” she said, sweetly, teasing in a singsong voice, “Somebody in here likes me. And I don’t think it’s the cockroaches.”

“Zip it,” he said, but smiled as he did.

She grinned and peered out of the window at the end of the room, at the wide-open spaces of Wyoming and the rolling hills in the distance. This country was so immense compared to the world she had known growing up inside the walls of Boston. She still struggled with the scale of it.

“All these little groups of people… scattered all over the place…” she pondered aloud while Joel wiped his hands on his jeans, trying to get the incredible grime of this place off his skin. She turned to face him, her eyebrows arced with a small but rising worry. “Not the bad guys like these assholes, but the good people, like Tala’s group at the Motel 6 or those people at the lake in Ohio… When the Fireflies get the cure from me… How are they ever gonna get it to all the people out there? How do you get the word out, you know?”

“Good question,” he said and turned on his heel to leave the building without another word.

Ellie was left alone in the darkness with a growing sense of doubt and dread.

_Somebody will figure it out. I just have to my part. It’ll work. It has to work._

She nodded to herself, satisfied, and followed him into the light.

**. . .**

A rusty, tin-roofed lean-to had been built behind one of the few buildings still standing, an old sandstone structure whose walls were still intact but the roof had given up the ghost years ago. A heavy, black, plastic tarp had been stretched out over the missing roof and tied in place with orange rope around the stubs of the rafters. It fluttered and flapped in the breeze. It was the only building left to search.

“Oh wow. Look at that!” she exclaimed from her position slightly behind him and several feet to his left.

Joel looked. She was pointing at something, her face beaming with happiness.

She said, “What a weird looking truck.”

“That ain’t a truck, girl. That’s an El Camino,” he said, trotting to the left to better see the thing, putting him close enough to her that she was tempted to reach out and touch him. “And they sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore.”

“It’s cute,” she offered, one hand gripped on the strap of the rifle, the other hand twitching, wanting to badly to touch him for emphasis, to connect with him.

_Touch his back. Don’t grab his butt!_

She did, grinning as her fingers running reassuringly across his shoulder blade.

He glanced down at her and smiled as they walked. “And it’s a damn sight more than cute. It’s cool as hell.”

She giggled adoringly and followed him closely as he jogged the last few yards to the vehicle. Joel only ran when he had to. If he was moving this fast, it had to be for a good reason.

_Maybe it runs? Maybe we won’t have to walk to Tommy’s?_

Joel had almost reached the old, strange looking truck when Ellie broke into a sprint and got there three steps before he did. She slapped her hands on the hood, the metal warmed by the afternoon sun, and cheered herself for her victory in the footrace.

“Woo! Got here first! I’m claiming this!”

Joel snorted a short laugh and continued on around her to reach for the driver’s door.

”Hands off,” Ellie snickered. “It’s mine. You heard me call it.”

“Shush,” he said in friendly tone. “I’m bigger than you. I don’t have to respect your claims.”

“Ass,” she giggled. “Nobody respects property rights anymore. That’s the problem with this world.”

She peered over his shoulder, her chest pressing against his arm and shoulder as she leaned against him, trying to see into the cab of the truck. An erotic, electric thrill pulsed through her briefly.

“I had one of these,” Joel was saying, his eyes taking in all the details of the vehicle’s interior. “A red and black one. 1970 Super Sport model. 396 cubic inches. Four speed transmission. Sweet little ride. I was restoring it in my spare time. Not quite the same as this one. This here’s a ’74. The front end is a little different. That’s the easiest way to tell.”

“You had an El Camaro? Neat,” she said as enthusiastically as she could manage. Joel saw something in these old cars that she couldn’t quite manage to find. But she liked sharing moments with him like this.

“El _Camino_ ,” he said, correcting her. “And yeah, I did. Kept in my backyard while I worked on it.”

“Cool. Did you have a garden back there too?”

He looked over his shoulder at her, her face so temptingly close to his as she leaned in to look through the window of the door.

“Do I look like the kind of man who’d garden on the weekends?”

“I’d like to have a garden,” she said, cutely defiant, not taking any shit from him about her love of nature. “One with a big gnome in it. He’d chase the gophers away.”

He shook his head and chuckled, standing up, taking in the rest of the truck with his eyes. It was in pretty good shape. The lean-to had kept it out of the sun. It wasn’t as dirty as old wrecks usually were nowadays.

“I’d call him Sven,” she was saying, standing closer than she needed to.

“Sven?”

“Or Waffles,” she responded, leaning against him, just a little. “Waffles the Gnome. It’s a good name for a gnome.”

He didn’t take the bait. He walked around the truck, taking a nice, long look at it. Ellie did the same, discretely splitting her attention between the truck and the man.

It was long and sleek, with lots of curves and few hard lines, nothing like the squared-off, boxy shapes of the military vehicles she had seen so often in Boston. It was painted in two colors, a dark chocolate brown for the most part with a lighter tan stripe wrapping all the way around it in a thick line. The paint was cracked and faded, chipped in several spots, but she could easily imagine how it had looked when it was new. There were chrome strips accentuating the curves and marking the places where one color of paint met the other. The metal had probably been very shiny once. The bed of the truck had rather low walls, especially as the shape of the fenders tapered towards the tailgate. It looked cool. It looked fast. But what sort of cargo could you haul in a bed that shallow and narrow, she wondered. Didn’t seem very practical.

This thing was sort of half a car and kind of half a truck. She supposed that back then, maybe people had trucks they didn’t need to haul much stuff in. That made sense. Everybody had a house to keep their stuff in. You didn’t need to carry all of your things with you everywhere you went.

The windows were dirty but intact. Not even a small crack could be found in the glass. That alone was a minor miracle. Seen through the windows, the cab was small. No back seat, just one long, tan vinyl bench for both driver and passenger to sit on.

“Do you think it runs?” she asked.

“Probably not,” he said.

“Shit.”

He noticed something that had escaped his attention before: All four tires were inflated.

He stopped abruptly. Ellie almost crashed into him.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Let’s check out that building,” he said tersely, not daring to get his hopes up.

**. . .**

Tools festooned the tabletop. Wrenches, ratchets, pliers, wire strippers, all sorts of tools. This room was more carefully looked after than the room in which the men had slept.

“Holy cow. There’s as many tools here as back at that garage with the… um…” she halted, looking for the right word. She didn’t want to be corrected again. “The Camaro!” she said, snapping her fingers in triumph, quite pleased with herself.

She looked to him for approval but his eyes were on a low table in the corner of the room. She glanced at it, but didn’t see anything particularly interesting about it. There was a heavy looking jug of blue plastic with a big screw-on cap, several rags, a wire brush, a pair of thick black rubber gloves, and a small pile of corroded rectangular metal plates that looked to have been partially scoured clean by the wire brush.

Joel seemed transfixed by what he saw.

_I bet I was looking at his dick with the same goony look on my face. What’s so special about that jun-_

Beneath the table, there were several old car batteries, all of them opened, the lids pried off, most of the metal plates inside pulled out. Discarded trash.

“Holy shit,” she gasped, putting all the pieces of this puzzle together.

**. . .**

She sat inside the car with the driver’s side door open. One foot was on the floorboard, the other was in the grass. The interior of the El Camino was a little too warm from a day spent parked in the sun.

“Pop the hood,” Joel said from where he stood by the front bumper. He was trying to keep his excitement in check, but she could see it written on his face.

“‘Kay,” she said, and pulled the lever he had pointed out to her a minute before.

The latch release popped free with a muffled metal thunk. He raised the hood.

“How’s it look?” she called out to him.

“350,” he said. “Good engine. Big for a small block, and simple. Take good care of a 350 and it’ll last your whole life.”

“So… that’s good?”

“It could use more chrome under the hood. But that’s a personal choice on my part,” he said, coming around to where she sat behind the wheel.

“Ha ha. Like I understand anything you’re saying.” She kicked at his shin lightly with the muddy toe of her sneaker. “Does it run, Mr. Car Guy?”

“Only one way to find out,” he smiled, genuinely excited in a way that made her heart race.

“Gonna teach me how to hotwire a car?” she cooed as she slid across the bench to make room for him in the cab.

“Hell, you little wild child,” he chided, patting her knee. “I figured you already knew.”

“I knew somebody who could do it. But I never got the chance to learn.”

“Today’s the day,” he said. “Hand me those wire strippers.”

**. . .**

He was kneeling in the grass, leaning in to work in the space between the floorboard and the underside of the dash. She was carefully replaying in her mind the things he had done. He had explained it step by step, making sure she was following along. She spoke to herself softly, counting the steps off on her fingers.

“Pull off the cover… Find the wire bundle…”

“And which one is the right bundle?” he asked.

“The one that leads to the ignition.”

“And then?”

“Find the red wires,” she said, extending a third finger and tapping it firmly with the index finger of her other hand. “The red ones are the battery wires.” She extended a fourth finger, her pinky. “Strip the ends of the red wires about half an inch, twist them together, and tape them up.”

“Right,” he nodded. The roll of electrical tape was still in her lap. She’d done a good job with that part. “That way they don’t short out against the metal of the steering column. But don’t tape all the copper over until you’re done. What comes next?”

She stuck out her thumb. “Find the yellow wire. That’s the ignition wire. Strip it and touch it to the red wires until the engine starts…” She hesitated for a minute, thinking hard. “And… that’s it. Right?”

“That’s it,” he nodded, proud of her. “Ready to do this?”

“I’m ready, pardner,” she grinned.

“Alright. Scoot on over then.” He got up, slid into the seat as she made room for him. “And keep your fingers crossed.”

“Let me do it,” she said, leaning in, watching him gather up the wires in his hand.

“Next time,” he responded and dragged the exposed copper end of the yellow wire against the tip of the paired red wires.

Sparks flew. The sharp smell of ozone filled the warm of the cab.

The old engine roared to life.

**. . .**

“Somebody’s up there’s looking out for us, Joel,” she said as she watched him slam the hood down.

“Darlin’,” he drawled as he came around to her and the driver’s seat, “if that were true, the whole world woulda never got in this mess in the first damn place.”

She looked up at him, her hands on the thin ring of the old steering wheel. “Not a big believer in the man upstairs, huh? I can understand that. I’ve got my doubts too.”

“Never said I don’t believe,” Joel sighed wearily. “I just don’t think He gives a flyin’ fuck about any of us anymore.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” she admitted with a small, noncommittal shrug of her narrow shoulders. She made a point not to let go of the wheel.

“Scootch,” he said, motioning with his hand for her to slide across the bench seat to the other side of the cab.

She held onto the wheel.

“Ellie,” he began.

“Let me drive! C’mon!” she said, giving him her best winning smile.

“Am I gonna have to move you?” he asked flatly.

“I _know_ how to drive!” she said, speaking fast, making her case quickly, before he put his foot down. She knew that once Joel closed a subject, it stayed close. Her mind raced for evidence to present in her defense. She hit him with the most adorable puppy dog eyes she possessed. “I really do! Heck, I drove you and Bill all around Billville. I’m a good driver. I couldn’t drive the motorcycle, but this is different. _I can do this_. You’ve seen me. You know I can. And when am I ever going to get a chance to drive again? Probably not for a long time. Maybe never! Who knows? This could be my _last chance!_ Ever ever _ever!_ Come on! Just for a few miles. Just so I can say I did. Okay? Whaddya say, dude? _Pleeeeeeease?_ ”

He sighed and crossed his arms. The engine of the El Camino loped smoothly in the background. A cool breeze blew in from the river to the east. Ellie kept smiling like her life depended on it.

**. . .**

The passenger door squeaked as it closed.

“You’re the greatest, coolest, adult I have _ever_ known, Joel,” Ellie gushed, almost bouncing on the seat. She ran her fingers lightly around and around the narrow circle of the steering wheel in excitement.

“I know it. So don’t you make me regret this,” he groused, settling into place next to her, on the passenger’s side of the cab. There wasn’t a lot of room to stretch out. She’d had to pull the bench seat forward so her feet could reach the pedals. “We lose this truck, and I’m breakin’ out the beatin’ stick.”

“Says the man who wrecked the truck _and_ the motorcycle,” she smirked, checking all the gauges, getting a feel for where everything was.

“That’s it,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “You blew it. I’m takin’ over.”

“No!” she shrieked, reaching across him to grab his wrist before he could pull the handle. “No!! Stop that! Stop it!”

He chuckled and nudged her back to her side of the cab. “Just don’t hit anything. You so much as bump a mailbox or scrape a guardrail and I’m revokin’ your learner’s permit.”

“What’s a learner’s permit?” she asked, gently waggling the gearshift in the crumbling rubber boot that concealed where mounted it to the floor.

“Oh lord,” he sighed dramatically. “So this is how it’s gonna end for me. Nobody to blame but myself, I suppose.”

“Shut up, you big jerk,” she cackled and opened her door. “And don’t steal my seat. I’m coming right back!”

He watched her hop out of the cab, genuinely surprised by her sudden departure.

“Where the hell are you going? We’re burnin’ gas, girl. You’re not gettin’ cold feet on me, are you?”

She unlaced her shoes while leaning against the side of the truck, bracing herself with the jut of her ripening hips pressed to the frame of the open doorway. She began pulling one muddy shoe off and then began removing the other.

“What are you doin’, Ellie?”

She popped her head inside just long enough to toss her shoes into the floorboard and nudge them under her seat where they would be out of the way while they dried.

“Socks are wet,” she said, before ducking back out. “It’s gross.”

She tugged the first icky sock off, then the second. She wiggled her toes in the dry grass and tossed the socks into the bed of the truck along with the few pieces of gear they were bringing alone that wasn’t stuffed into one of the backpacks tucked away inside the cab.

“Much better!” she exclaimed as she darted back inside, plopped back down on the old vinyl seat, and pulled the door shut. She slid into the front seat, taking the wheel with both hands. The harsh, no-slip rubber coverings of the pedals felt weird against her bare feet as she shifted into first gear. She turned her head and grinned at him. “C’mon, dude. We’re hauling ass.”

“It’s a three speed,” he said, as her fingers curled around the cracked and chipped plastic knob of the gearshift. “So don’t rev it too high and try and keep it under a hundred, alright Ellie?”

“Ellie, Queen of the Highway,” she said to herself, though her high, excited voice was more than loud enough for Joel to hear. She worked the shifter into the first gear slot, released the clutch, and eased the truck from beneath the covering of the lean-to, into the sunlight, and away from the rest stop before turning onto the blacktop of I-80. She sped up a little, deftly shifting into second. “Too bad there’s only one more gear to go. What we really need is a ten speed. That’s a thing cars can have, right?”

“Lord help us,” Joel said.

She leaned over just a little and punched him in the arm, never taking her eyes off the road. “That’ll be enough of that. Blacktop Ellie doesn’t take any lip from her passengers. Behave yourself or I won’t let you be my navigator.”

Joel feigned indigence. “When exactly did you get to thinkin’ that I’m the –“

“Shh! You’re the navigator now. I just called it. I’m the captain of this ship, bucko. Don’t make me force you to walk the plank or ride in the back with my wet socks or something even worse.”

He watched her driving, green eyes bright and sparkling, the afternoon sun bathing her lovely face in a soft yellow-orange glow. She shone like the sun, heart-achingly beautiful to him.

She didn’t notice him staring. Instead, she glanced at the AM radio built into the dashboard and the aftermarket tape deck mounted underneath, just in front of the shifter.

She spoke with an edge of joy in her voice. “Get my backpack, okay?”

Joel pulled her dark green nylon pack from where it rested next to his in the narrow space behind the seat.

”You need the map?” Joel asked.

“Oh, buddy buddy buddy,” Ellie cooed. “You are in for a _treat_. Open the big zipper and reach inside. It should be right on top, wrapped up in my windbreaker.”

Joel began to work the zipper along the length of its toothy track.

“And don’t go poking around in there,” she cautioned. “A girl needs her privacy.”

He snorted. “I’m not going to find your porn stash in here, am I?”

“Hah! As if!” she swaggered, and blew air through her lips, playing it cool, a little rebel who wasn’t afraid of anything.

_Please don’t find my porn please don’t find my porn please don’t find my porn._

“There!” she whooped, when he pulled her Walkman out. “That’s it! Pop the tape out and put in that tape player down there, okay?”

“I didn’t hear the magic word,” he needled her gently, tape in hand.

“Do you want to get out and walk? Put my tape in! Please. C’mon. It’ll be fun. We need some music. I want to share my amazing mixtape with you, you butt head.”

He popped the cassette into the old tape player. It clicked loudly as the tape dropped into place inside the machine. Old sprockets began to turn.

“- step off the train. I’m walking down your street again,” the woman on the tape was singing. “Passed your door but you don’t live there anymore.”

“I like this song,” she said. “The batteries died a couple of weeks ago while I was listening to it. I was starting to wonder if I’d ever hear it again.”

“And I miss you,” the woman crooned to them from a recording studio decades in the past, “like the deserts miss the rain.”

He zipped her bag up and wedged it behind the seat again, next to his own pack and the spare tire, none the wiser about the issue of Playboy she kept hidden at the bottom. She breathed a silent sigh of relief and self-congratulation.

_Ninja._

“I remember when this song was on the radio,” Joel grunted, shifting about, stretching his sore back, twisting slightly at the waist.

“I can believe that. You are pretty old,” Ellie said, slyly cutting her eyes over to him.

“Shut it, you little shit, and watch the road,” he grumped, resting his head on the wall of the cab, watching the road roll by outside the passenger’s window.

She giggled and began to sing along with the music.

“And I miss you-oooo…” she crooned, mostly on key, “like the deserts miss the rain.”

A few minutes later, as the next song was coming to an end, she looked over with ever more questions ready on her lips only to find Joel sound asleep. She turned down the music a bit and hummed along instead. Even tough guys needed their rest, and she loved him too much to wake him up. Her questions could wait. And besides, he was so cute when he was sleeping.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Fort Steele Rest Area is to the north of I-80. The Fort Fred Steele Historic Site is to the south of I-80. I combined them into one location for this story. It’s not like Naughty Dog didn’t take a few liberties with geography themselves. They combined the county of Jackson Hole, Wyoming with Jackson County, Colorado and dropped it on the banks of the Snake River and called it Jackson City!
> 
> Habitating isn’t a word. I know that. But I just like how some words sound, even if Mr. Webster assures me that they’re not really words and I should be ashamed for using them. I use them anyway and I don’t look back when the spellchecker explodes in a giant fireball. Badass fic writers never look back at grammar explosions, no matter how big they are. We just keep walking towards the reader in slow motion like a badass. That’s just how we roll in the world of fanfic. ;-)
> 
> Joel’s red and black El Camino (or possibly Ranchero) can be seen in his backyard through the patio door that he comes racing through after being attacked by his neighbor, Jimmy.
> 
> My dad owned a midnight blue ’72 El Camino. He loved that funky hybrid car/truck. I loved it too. As I get older, I toy with the notion of buying one. The ’74 model is my favorite and I see them listed for sale every now and then, usually for less that 15,000. Maybe I’ll get one and drive across the country in it when I retire one of these days. My dad taught me to hotwire a car when I was twelve. It’s the little moments that make the best memories.
> 
> Ellie is a sharp kid. At some point on her journey, after seeing how the world is, she would have to wonder how the Fireflies could possibly distribute the vaccine under such impossible conditions. She would have to see how unlikely it is. In my mind, Ellie deals with it as an act of faith. She decides that the Fireflies know more than she does and that they must have some kind of a plan. That’s how she deals with it: hopeful denial. It’s not logical, but it’s a very human thing to do.
> 
> I could have sworn that Sade sang the song on Ellie’s tape. According to Google, I’m not alone in that. It’s “Missing” by the group Everything But The Girl. Good track.
> 
> And Ellie has touched Joel’s penis. Officially. That’s a pretty good note to end on if you ask me, so I’ll see you guys again soon with the final installment of volume two of Flying To Wyoming II, Chapter thirty: Sleeping Bag.


	30. Sleeping Bag

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here it is, the final doorstop of a chapter that concludes volume two and tells the story of what happened between Ellie and Joel on that last night before they reach Jackson. Our heroes finally get some stuff out in the open. Also, there is smooching. Also, clothes come off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Has it really been thirty chapters already? Plus twenty in the first volume? Plus the Riley/Ellie one-shot? Wow, I’ve put a lot of words into this fic so far. I think I’ll lie down and take a nap now.

**“MILES TO GO”**  
**Chapter 30 – Sleeping Bag**

 

The cloud of gun smoke in the air stung her eyes.

_Where’d he go? Where’d he go?_

She scanned the trash strewn, rotting street for the last bandit. The first two were dead, one killed by her rifle, slumped against the side of an old truck, the other face down on the blacktop with a caved in skull courtesy of Joel’s baseball bat. The third one was still out there, somewhere behind one of the cars maybe, or on the other side of the mandatory evacuation sign, or behind the rain barrels –

_There!_

A figure darted from behind the dumpster. It wasn’t Joel. Anyone who wasn’t Joel was a target.

She pulled the trigger. The stock of the rifle bucked against her shoulder. She would have a bruise there tomorrow, like she always did after firing the Winchester.

The bullet struck the lamppost instead, striking the rusted steel surface of the pole just as the hunter sprinted past it.

_Fuck! Missed!_

She worked the bolt action, pulling the little lever back, ejecting the smoking brass casing, cycling a new round into the chamber. The lever wouldn’t go all the way forward. The fresh bullet was misaligned, it wouldn’t seat properly. She couldn’t close the action. She couldn’t make the rifle fire again until she did.

The hunter had a glass bottle of gasoline in his hand. The rag was already lit.

Joel was thirty feet away from the hunter, kneeling behind the fender of an old truck, his back to the man with the firebomb. He hadn’t heard the shot for some reason. He didn’t react. He wasn’t aware of the man coming up behind him with murderous intent.

_Fucking thing!_

Ellie frantically fought with the troublesome rifle. There was still time. She could still save him!

_I have to tell him!_

She opened her mouth to scream a warning to him.

A hand clamped down on her mouth, smothering any sound. The hand was small but strong. Her own hands didn’t seem to be aware of this new development. They continued to struggle with the malfunctioning rifle.

_Joel! JOEL! Turn around!!_

The hunter threw the bottle. It sailed through the air, streaming smoke and flame.

_JOEL!_

“He deserves it,” Kristi hissed into her ear, her lips close enough to Ellie’s face that the girl could smell the musty, dank smell of cordyceps on her breath.

The bottle smashed into Joel’s back. He burst into flames.

“JOEL!”

She couldn’t move. Kristi held her down with strong hands of polyester and cotton, binding her up with restraints shaped like a waterproof liner. She kicked at the woman who reshaped herself into an abstract shape enveloping her. She thrashed. Joel needed her. She wouldn’t let him die. She had to save him!

“Joel!” she grunted, straining against the sleeping bag, pushing, kicking.

“What?” Joel was saying, the Taurus revolver in his hand, bleary eyes narrow and sweeping the dark forest around them, looking for hunters that only she had seen. “What is it?”

_Dream._

She stopped moving. She was sitting up, or trying to. The bag around her was holding her down

_Oh God. Not real. Just a stupid dream. Not real._

She lay down, gasping for breath, feeling foolish and very tired.

“Fuck,” she lamented. “Sorry. Bad dream.”

Joel shifted; his legs snug against hers inside the sleeping bag. He was still propped up on one elbow. He watched her lay there with her back to him. She was embarrassed, he was certain of it. He exhaled, lowering the revolver and letting it rest in his hand on the outside of the sleeping bag, along the shape of his thigh. After a moment or two of letting her breathe and compose herself, he spoke again.

“Scared the shit out of me, kiddo.”

“Not like I have any control over my nightmares,” she grumped.

“Hey now. It’s all right,” he said in an understanding manner, tucking the revolver back into its place beneath the small pile of folded towels and shirts they were using as a pillow, “I understand how it is with bad dreams.”

She snorted, a noncommittal sound, embarrassed and angry with herself and wanting, just a little, to make it his fault somehow.

He lay down and pulled the end of the bag up around them. She said nothing, continuing to rest on her side. She sniffed softly and wiggled back against him just a little when he spooned in behind her, sharing the warmth of his sleeping bag with her now that the nights had become cold.

“I know how it is,” he said soothingly, his breath warm on the back of her neck.

“Fff! Yeah,” she groused, still mad at both herself and at him for reasons that didn’t make much sense to her half-awake brain but were more than good enough to be pissed off at the world. “You have ‘em more than I do. Don’t hear me cryin’ about it.”

Joel knew she didn’t mean it. She was just grouchy and unsettled. Bad dreams usually left him the same way, and he suspected that more than a little of her foul mood was his continued avoidance of her questions regarding his nightmares. She wanted him to share. He didn’t. It bothered her. She wanted to know more about him, wanted to help him, wanted to reach out to him. Some doors were open between them now, but many more were still closed and would likely stay that way.

He squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “Let’s just get back to sleep, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she huffed and lay still.

Inside the cozy confines of the sleeping bag, Joel placed his hand on the rise of her hip.

“It’s okay, Ellie,” he said softly. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t real. It can’t hurt you.”

Sometimes it could. Dreams of terrible memories were just as terrible in their own way, like picking at a scab in your mind, refusing to let the wound heal.

“I know,” she yawned. “I’m good.”

In the darkness, her hand slipped over his, fingers entwining, and she pulled their hands around her, until his arm was across her belly. He pulled her in close, holding her against him, feeling her relax as they breathed together beneath the starry sky, next to the cold remains of their campfire in the little forest glen. She sighed contentedly and darkness stole over her without her realizing it.

She was alone in the sleeping bag when she woke up.

The smell of food wafted over her. The outside of the sleeping bag was lightly damp with dew, as were her auburn bangs. A few birds, the ones Joel said were too dumb to have flown south for the winter, chirped in the branches. Early morning sunlight was warm on her face. She lay there for a minute and kept as still as she could. She didn’t want to wake up yet. The bad dream had been replaced with a good one. She kept her eyes closed and tried to hold on to the fading scraps of the dream.

_We were making love in the sleeping bag. We were naked together… and kissing… and touching… and he was inside me… and I loved being with him like that… being a grownup with him… a woman with him… his woman… and he was my man… and we were together and safe and happy…and doing it like crazy… Mmmm._

She smiled, her eyes still closed, and snuggled into the towel-pillow.

_We made camp early. We got undressed. We were naked in the woods and it was warm and sunny and we were like Adam and Eve… Everything was perfect… We were clean. Our skin and our hair were clean. Our clothes were clean. We had plenty of food. We still had the El Camino… We had driven it through the woods somehow… It wasn’t spewing smoke from the engine… it broke down and we left on the side of the road back at that bridge… down at the base of the mountains… What was the name of that place?_

“Joel?” she murmured, cozy and warm in the sleeping bag, wanting to be asleep, realizing that Joel had let her sleep in, wanting to give him a big kiss in a minute for being such a sweet butt head.

“Yeah?” he said from a few feet away, sitting by the campfire from the sound of it. Utensils clinked and scraped in the aluminum cooking pan of his camping kit.

“What was the name of that river we crossed?” she mumbled dreamily. “The one where we left the El Camino?”

“What’s that you said?” Joel said innocently though she could hear the faint smile on his lips as he spoke. “You want to get up and help me with breakfast and stop being such a lazybones? Why, that’s a fine idea, Ellie. A _fine_ idea.”

“Uh huh. Did you just say that you’re sorry for being such a dick and eating so much of our food and you’re shocked that your sinister plan to smother me in my sleep didn’t work so now you have to share some of the remaining food with me? Scraps, really. Did I hear that right?” Ellie snarked, her eyes still closed, pulling the sleeping bag more tightly around her. “I’m glad you confessed to me the way you did, Joel. That took a lot of courage.”

“ _Up_ ,” Joel said dryly. “Time to start the day, sleepyhead.”

Ellie sat up, stretched, yawned, grunted, grumbled, the sleeping bag bunching around her waist, her paw print emblazoned t-shirt wadded up around her torso, just under her bra, her jeans wadded up at her hips and knees, her socks loose, pushed partway off her feet during her restless sleep.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,” Ellie groaned, opening her eyes at last, squinting at the daylight, her arms still extended out from her shoulders, turning back and forth at the waist, trying to stretch and twist her body into life. “What time is it?”

“‘Bout two hours since it was when I got up,” Joel said, watching her tug her shirt down, the fork in his hand stirring the concoction in the pan.

He was dressed, of course. They were out of doors, as he liked to say, so they had to sleep with their clothes on, just in case they had to get moving in a hurry. His boots were on and he was wearing the leather jacket he’d found in the survivalist’s stash, back in the little town with the pawnshop. Ellie had killed that man before he could strangle Joel. The jacket was a good fit. Joel didn’t care how he had come by it, but Ellie remembered. She shoved the memory of the pawnshop, with its stale air and musty walls, out of her mind. Joel had said something else just now and she fumbled around in her brain searching for it.

“Two hours? Really?” Ellie asked, scooting out of the sleeping bag on her butt, pulling her legs free and then tugging her socks up. She began to pull on her shoes and then lace them up. “Why didn’t you wake me up, dummy?”

“Figured you were due a little bit of extra sleep, I suppose. We’ve made good progress these last few days, all things considered. Not counting that day we spent cooped up under the camper shell of that old pickup because of the weather, we’ve done pretty good.”

“That was a good day,” she said, shrugging the three-color windbreaker on. It was chilly this morning. She grinned at him as she zipped it up. “I liked that truck. It was pouring cats and dogs out there and the rain sounded really cool coming down on that camper shell.”

“You went stir crazy in that camper,” he chuckled.

“Only a little,” she said. “We were in there from dinnertime one night to lunchtime the next day. It was a small space. _Anybody_ would go crazy from that. Besides,” she smiled slyly, “we made out in there. Lots of kissing, as I recall. Somebody’s boobs were played with. There may have been a generous and _way overdue_ amount of boob sucking… and the tenderness I’m still experiencing tells me there may have been a LOT of intense nipple _pinching_ , but my memory gets a little fuzzy at that part. So, yeah, that day was pretty good, if you ask me.”

_My nipples were sore for the rest of the day. They’re STILL kind of sensitive. Man! So fucking awesome. You’re a real beast when you get going Joel. It’s scary but FUCK it really turns me on._

Joel pointed his fork at her to emphasize his next point, trying to conceal his smile. “We couldn’t even sit up all the way inside that damn thing. And you sang ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall _three times_. I thought for sure I was gonna strangle you by the end.”

“Pfft. That was _before_ the making out. That doesn’t count. Making out pardons all offenses. My poor nipples paid for my crimes. I’m reformed now. On the straight and narrow, dude.”

He snorted a small, tight laugh and stirred the food again while she rolled up the sleeping bag.

_You liked the making out, don’t deny it._

“So… How many miles have we covered?” she asked, coming over to sit in the damp grass alongside him, stretching out by the old, mossy log he was resting his back against. The edge of the neatly folded map of Wyoming was poking out of his pack where it rested in the grass, on the far side of his hip, safely away from the consuming flames of the campfire.

“You mean since yesterday?” he responded. “Or since the truck broke down?”

“Since the truck broke down.”

“Something like sixty or sixty-five miles, I reckon.”

“That’s all?! In _three days?_ Man, we’re _never_ getting to Jackson!” She stood up suddenly, bursting with unfocused energy, paced around in tiny circle, her shoes stirring up a spray of the last of the morning dew, and just as suddenly she sat down on the log, denim slapping against damp bark. “Jeez!”

“Yes, we will. We’re real close now.”

“Gah! It takes _forever_ to get anywhere when you’re walking.”

From her place on the log, she looked down at him sitting in the grass and nudged his bicep playfully with the edge of her shoe. Thirty miles wasn’t so bad, now that she’d had a moment to think about it. She felt like an ass for blowing up at him. She poked him with her shoe again and grinned, playing with him, wanting to smooth things over with a large dollop of cuteness.

He pushed her foot away gently. “Sure does. Ain’t you glad we only had to walk here from that creek and not all the way from Pittsburgh?”

She leaned back, swinging her feet, striking her heels against the log, drumming a rhythm of frustration and youthful impatience. She studied the tall trees around her, looked up at the clouds drifting above. They were puffy and white today, not gray and heavy with rain. Maybe they could stay dry today.

“So what was the name of the creek?” she asked, bumping his arm with her foot.

“Boulder Creek,” he said, and passed up to her a bowl of warm mixed vegetables with sliced bits of Vienna sausages stirred in.

“And what’s the name of this delightful dish?” she asked, one eyebrow raised in mock alarm.

“Breakfast. Eat it,” he said.

She grinned and began to shovel the weird concoction into her mouth. They were almost out of food. At this point, he was throwing anything together that would get some meat and vegetable into their bellies. She was happy to eat it. She poked his arm with the side of her shoe again. “Better not be poisoned or anything. I’ve paid my debt to society, warden.”

“You keep wipin’ that dirty shoe on my sleeve and that foot’s gonna wind up on the menu, girl.”

She squealed and pulled her foot away from him, crossing her ankles. She giggled. He could be grumpy in the mornings. She didn’t hold it against him. If you were going to be a successful team, you had to let the little things slide.

**. . .**

They had broken camp. They were on the move again.

He adjusted the straps of his pack as he walked, settling the weight more evenly across his shoulders. Without the bike and its cargo boxes, there was more to carry, more than he had carried in a while. The rifle and the shotgun swung from his shoulders, the leather slings squeaking and rubbing quietly as he walked. He began to toy with the notion of letting her carry the rifle for a while. She would happily accept the burden. She would see it as proof of his trust in her, which it was. It was also be eight pounds of wood and steel off his back for a while.

“How many miles to Jackson,” she asked, brimming with questions like always.

“It was ninety miles or so from Boulder Creek. Remember? We worked it out on the map.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, sticking close to him, working their way through the thick forest together, moving down the hill, back towards the highway. They never spent the night within sight of a road if they could help it. Safer that way. “So…. How much further do we have to go?”

“You do the math. I told you how far we’ve traveled since then. Remember?”

“Um… you said sixty miles, right?”

“Yep.”

“So… About thirty miles left?”

“Yeah. Probably get there tomorrow.”

“Good,” Ellie said, suddenly vaguely worried for some reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She repeated it once more to convince herself that the words were true. “Good.”

_What was it he said…?_

_We find Tommy… He used to be a Firefly… He’ll know where to take you._

Ellie took a deep breath and held it for a minute while she willed her uneasy stomach to settle itself.

_Don’t be dumb, Ellie. He won’t ditch me. Not after all we’ve been through. He won’t. I don’t even know why I’m worried about that._

_He won’t._

 

* * *

 

_Why haven’t we done it yet?_

_We spent a night inside the El Camino and made out a little. Kissing, mostly. We spent the night in that old camper truck when the rain was hitting us full blast and we made out a little more. My shirt came off, but that was it. We’ve spent the last three nights in the sleeping bag. We kiss a few times. He touches me a little. But we haven’t really done anything since the night in the pickup with the camper shell. Why not? Every guy thinks about sex all the time. That’s what Riley said. Cherry too. And I can feel his hard-on when we’re all cuddled up in the bag._

_So why haven’t we done it yet?_

“Too bad about the El Camino,” she said, wanting a break from the tight knot of thoughts racing around and around inside her head. She’d talked herself out of any thoughts of abandonment, but now a new anxiety was nibbling at the edges of her mind.

_He wants me, right? I want him. I want him so bad it’s driving me crazy._

“Yeah,” he said, surprised that she had managed to stay quiet for almost twenty minutes. It wasn’t like her. Walking uphill, mile after mile, must be taking some of the extra energy out of her, he decided.

_He does stuff to me. But he never lets me do anything to him. Not really. Not the stuff I want to do._

“Guess those guys didn’t take very good care of it,” she offered, moving up to walk directly beside him.

_I want to see you cum, Joel. Why won’t you let me do that for you?_

The old truck had carried them a little over two hundred miles before the worn-out engine gave up and began to split more hoses than he had enough tape to patch. The girl was right. The guys they had taken it from hadn’t been as fastidious with its maintenance as the woman whose motorcycle they had taken back in Ohio.

_I want us to both cum, Joel. C’mon. Why are you being so stubborn about this shit?_

“The hoses just wore out,” Joel said. “If we had a couple of good hoses that fit, we could go back and get it and drive it the rest of the way. But I didn’t seem to have any hoses for a 350 small block in my pack at that time.”

“Odd,” she grinned. “You seem to be able to fit everything else in there.”

“It’s all in how you pack it,” he said, tousling her ponytail affectionately.

She grinned and wanted to lean against him but held herself in check.

“At least I got to drive it for a little while,” she said. “That was really cool. Thanks for that, by the way.”

“You’re a good driver,” he said.

She shined a beautiful, heart-warming smile of gratitude at him and he felt those old feelings stirring again.

_I want to make you cum, Joel. I do._

“Yeah,” she said cutely, adjusting her ponytail, giving him her best shit-eating grin, trying hard to be cool, which had become easier for her lately. She sniffed smugly. “I’m pretty awesome.”

Joel chuckled and kept his eyes on the tall grass and the steep hill and the damned numerous tree branches in front of him. He pointedly didn’t look at the girl, even though she was obviously trying to get his attention in that markedly unsubtle way that she seemed to think was incredibly subtle. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t need to.

Every inch of her was burned into his mind’s eye.

He was dreaming about her all the time, and the dreams had only become more intense since they’d begun sharing the sleeping bag. Every night now, he was with her in his mind. Sometimes her, sometimes a girl that looked like her. Sometimes a shy virgin, sometimes a jaded prostitute. Sometimes a girl from the world as it used to be, sometimes a girl from the world as it was now. Sometimes a runaway that needed a place to stay, sometimes a daughter of a client that he knew he shouldn’t touch but couldn’t help himself. Sometimes a friend of Sarah’s, sometimes her babysitter, sometimes a girl that Tess had accepted as payment from Robert and given to Joel as a gift, sometimes a thief that he had caught stealing from them and hidden safely away before Tess could find her, sometimes a slut, sometimes scared, sometimes tough, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes she seduced, sometimes she struggled, sometimes she pulled him close, sometimes she scratched and bit, sometimes she played coy, sometimes she was in heat, sometimes this, sometimes that, sometimes a way he wanted, sometimes a way he had only fantasized about, sometimes in a way he had never wanted before until he wanted it from her at the moment. Sometimes a girl. Sometimes a woman. Sometimes a mix of both. But always horny, whether she hid it or not. Fifty dreams. Fifty different girls, all with the same face.

Why can’t I keep my hands off you, girl? he wondered grimly. Oh Jesus, I’ve gotta find Tommy soon. I can’t hold this fire inside me back much longer. I’m gonna fuck you, real soon. God help me, I’m gonna fuck you, girl. I can’t stop it. Can’t stop thinking about it… about you… about us…

“Yeah,” he said, fearing the silence if he left it to hang in the air too long, smiling a little, hoping it didn’t encourage her too much. “You’ve got your good points, I reckon.”

“Thanks, dude. That means a lot to me, you know? I’m glad you let me take turns behind the wheel.”

“Well, it broke down while it was your turn, Ellie,” he said. It was safer to tease her than risk giving her too many compliments. He didn’t want to think about where that might lead, what he might say, what she might hear, even if he didn’t exactly come right out and say it. “That means we’ve each lost a truck on this trip. Score’s startin’ to tighten up. Neck and neck, if you ask me.”

“Nobody asked you,” she snarked, trying to regain her position in the lead. “Yeah, well… You’re ahead by one motorcycle.”

“Motorcycle is pretty much just a field goal,” he said coolly “It hardly counts for anything.”

“Pfft.” She stuck her tongue out at him. “You keep telling yourself that, dude.”

_Ask him! Ask him what’s wrong, find out why you’re not doing it. Or doing more. Find out what he wants you to do that you’re not doing. Tell him you want to see his dick again. Tell him something, Ellie. Hurry! Before it’s too late!_

He came to a stop without warning.

“Goddamit,” Joel sighed heavily.

She looked, eyes suddenly worried, trying to find what had upset him.

She saw it too.

“Goddamnit,” she echoed.

The road ahead of them was blocked. There was a mountain lying on top of it.

 

* * *

 

Joel grunted, straddling a wet, slick, mossy green log that had fallen across the floor of the forest, doing his best not to drag his balls over the trunk of the big, old tree as he levered himself over it. The damn thing was so long it was just easier to go over it rather than walk all the way around it. This wasn’t Boston. Trees grew tall in this part of country.

“Watch your step,” he said in a weary mumble. “Slippery.”

“Ugh,” Ellie grunted by way of acknowledgement. She groaned and threw a tired leg over the slick bark, heaving herself up on her belly, half-rolling over the top of the big log and eased herself over it. She had slid lightly over another big log at the campsite this morning, quick and playful. Now she was tired. Each new obstacle was a challenge that had to be faced with steadily eroding reserves. The road was gone, covered over by a landslide. Now they were going overland, cutting through the forest. It was all uphill, no smooth, paved surface that made for a steady stride. This was tough, uneven ground. They had to find a way back to the highway soon or else thirty miles of this would take a month to cover.

Joel took a deep breath of the thin air and glanced back at the girl.

Ellie was falling behind again. He slowed down to let her catch up but he made sure to do it as discretely as possible. She got resentful in that pouty, obnoxious, teenaged way if he even hinted that she might be slowing him down. She didn’t want to be a burden. She was a good kid, but she always got grumpy in the hour or so before lunch. He didn’t want to listen to her whine, or worse, listen to her deny that she was whining. Better to just pretend to be surveying the way ahead, maybe looking for a shortcut while she discretely fell into place behind him, and pretend like she’d never fallen behind at all.

The distance to Jackson as it appeared on the map didn’t seem like a lot, he mused as she came to a stop beside him, but when you were on foot, and walking up hill every step of the way towards the Rocky Mountains, you were lucky to cover ten miles a day.

The road they had been following up the side of this mountain for the last few days had run out two hours ago. Large chunks of it were gone, missing, lost to the deep green forest below. The rest of it was covered in boulders and rubble. Had a landslide taken the road? Maybe. But it looked to Joel to be more like the result of a lot of explosives. He hadn’t seen any sign of old battles in Wyoming, like there were back in Ohio and Texas. Unlikely then that it had been Air Force bombers or Army demolition teams. Could it have been the Fireflies that brought the road down? Tommy had cut ties with that outfit before he left Boston. Had they followed him out here? Were they waiting somewhere up ahead? That would simplify things, a bit, sure. But it would complicate them too, in a way. He knew he had to get Ellie to the Fireflies, yet he wasn’t quite ready to let her go.

Gonna have to, he thought, one way or the other. Either Tommy takes her off my hands, or I pass her off to those idiots myself. Either way…

“Lunch soon?” Ellie mumbled from her place at his side, breathing a little hard and doing her best to conceal it.

“Soon,” he said, feeling the effort of making the words. It wasn’t just the girl who was tired. He placed his hands in the small of his back and stretched. “Just another half hour. How’s that sound?”

Ellie was silent. It was her way of complaining without complaining.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said.

She nodded, her hands on her hips, her eyes on the ground, still getting air into her aching lungs as discretely as she could manage. “Sounds good, boss.”

He reached over, twirled her ponytail with his hand and she smiled up at him. His heart began to ache in a way that made him forget about his back.

Joel began to walk before she had the chance to say anything. He was tired, sure, but he still wanted to fuck her. The feeling had been scorching him all day. It wouldn’t go away. And when she looked at him like that, all smiles and freckles and sweetness? Jesus. He could feel the desire for her rising up inside him like an inferno. Better to start moving before something funny or adorable or emotional came spilling out of her mouth. Better to keep moving.

Ellie doggedly put one foot in front of the other, determined to keep up with him.

Gonna miss you, sweetheart, he mused glumly. But it’s the best thing for you. You ain’t gonna like it much… but one of these days, you’ll be glad I did it.

 

* * *

 

The only good thing about losing the El Camino was that it had a quarter tank of gas left when it died. The fuel bottle attached to his compact camp stove was filled to the top. A plastic sports bottle almost a third full was hanging from the side of his pack, wrapped up in an old plastic Safeway grocery bag.

The last of the unnamed dish, leftovers from this morning’s breakfast, sizzled in its aluminum wrapping at the center of his unfolded cooking pan. Ellie leaned in and sniffed the rising aroma.

”MMmmm,” she groaned happily, and the deep, erotic moan she made Joel’s cock stir just a little in his jeans.

“Changed your mind about my new recipe?” he chided.

“Man, I could eat a shoe right now,” she retorted, rolling her eyes. “But I need both my shoes, so I guess I’ll take a chance with your cooking instead.”

“You’re cooking tonight then,” he said.

“You’ve got a fucking deal, Joel,” she grinned, pushing her fork into the bowl he offered her. She shoved the food into her mouth and spoke around it. “Wah hah weh goh tah eeh?”

“What have we got to eat?” he asked, translating her native language on the fly.

“Yeh,” she said, chewing.

“You’re looking at the last of it, Red,” he said, holding up his own partially filled bowl. “After this, we don’t have anything else in the pantry.”

“Fuhh,” Ellie cursed softly.

“Yeah,” Joel said with a resigned grunt. “Fuck.”

**. . .**

It was time to get up, he thought.

They’d sat here well over the half hour he’d planned for lunch. He glanced up at the sun, still high in the sky. Ellie opened her pack and began to dig through it.

“Tell me you got some more M&Ms in there,” he chuckled.

“Better!” she grinned and pulled a joke book out. Quickly she began to thumb through it, trying to find where she’d left off last time.

“Why do you do this me, Ellie? I’ve been pretty nice to you this whole time but you just keep comin’ at me with those terrible jokes.”

“Oh please. This is the highlight of your day and you know it.”

He grunted noncommittally.

“What do you call a cow eating grass?” she asked, sitting up straight and proud, putting on her best performance for him.

Joel sighed.

“A lawn mooer,” she exclaimed and laughed. “Man, Will Livingston’s a _genius_.”

Joel sighed.

“Okay, here’s a good one,” she enthused. “They’re all good, of course, but you’re _really_ gonna like this one.”

“God, wouldn’t that be a nice change of pace,” he muttered.

“Shh! Let the joy into your heart, Joel. Grumpy old fart. Now listen. Here’s one just for you…” She cleared her throat and continued. “I didn’t like my beard at first… but then it grew on me.”

“Alright,” Joel grunted, getting to his feet. “Time to get goin’ before somebody gets hurt.”

“One more!” she cackled as he pulled her up by one arm, still reading from the book in her free hand. “I dropped my burger on the floor… Now it’s ground beef.”

He groaned and stalked off. She cackled and ran to catch up with him.

“Joel! Joel! Did you hear the story about the peacock?”

“No,” grunted Joel.

“It’s a beautiful tale! Get it?” Her laughter echoed across the surrounding hillside.

 

* * *

 

“Do you really hate my jokes?” Her voice was small, hesitant, hiding a hint of uncertainty behind a tone of friendliness.

“No,” Joel said, reaching over and squeezing her shoulder. “I don’t mind ‘em too much. I’m just givin’ you a hard time is all. Some of ‘em are actually sorta funny. And they sure seem to give you a lot of joy. God only knows why.”

“Pssh. Making someone smile is a very nice thing to do,” she said proudly. “Giving somebody a good laugh is how you let them know you care.”

Joel took a deep breath, already regretting what he was about to do.

“Man walks up to three nuns and whips out his dick,” he said and Ellie’s face began to glow with surprise and overwhelming happiness. “The first nun had a stroke. The second nun also had a stroke. But the third nun? She refused to touch it.”

She laughed and leaned against him.

“Thank you,” she said sweetly.

“Welcome,” he said and let her hold his hand when he felt her small fingers sliding in between his. “It’s an old joke. I learned that it sixth grade, I think.”

“New to me,” she beamed, squeezing his big hand, her love for him making her feel like she could float away if he wasn’t here to anchor her. “And I grew up around nuns!”

They crested a small ridgeline, hand in hand. It was just a small hollow, a shallow little bowl of grassy lowland tucked between two hills. At the bottom of it, a clear pool of water sparkled in the sunlight.

“What’s that?” she asked, the index finger of her free hand coming up to point at something among the trees on the other side of the hollow, partway up the slope, across from and a few yards above the sparkling waters of a little pond.

It was a tiny, cozy looking, little shack.

“That?” Joel smirked, “Looks like laundry day to me.”

“Fuck yeah!” she proclaimed and squeezed his hand tightly.

_We are going to get so damn naked together, buddy._

**. . .**

“Everything I have is dirty,” she said in a quiet voice, her pistol in hand as they crept through the grass at the edge of the pond, approaching the tiny building warily. “Seriously. I’ve worn everything I own twice, _at least_.”

“Don’t see anybody,” Joel said, his voice low. “Widows are still intact. Probably unbreakable, I’d bet. Places like these are either built cheap to last just a season or two or else they build ‘em rock solid to last forever.”

“Who builds a house that small?” she whispered.

“It’s a hunter’s shack,” he said, creeping close enough to risk a quick peek into the window. “And it’s empty.”

“Hunters?” Worried. Her eyes made a quick sweep of the tall grass and trees around them.

“The old kind of hunters,” he said in a normal voice, standing up from a crouch, his back and knees grateful for it. There was no danger here. “Back when all people hunted were animals.”

“Oh. Okay, I get it,” she replied, speaking louder, straightening up, taking her cue from him. “But why is it so small?”

“Somebody owned this land, way back when,” Joel said. “And he must’ve liked to come out here to hunt. But he didn’t want to sleep in a tent on the cold, hard ground way up in these mountains. So he built… or probably hired somebody to build this shack for him. Think of it like a motel built for just one person. Cozy and warm and waterproof.”

Ellie brightened at that. “I’m liking it already.”

The building was small and square, maybe twelve feet on each side and no more then ten feet tall. The thick boards of the walls were tightly fitted with all-weather sealant closing the gaps. The roof was intact, stainless steel and painted flat black, no water was getting in that way. The window was dirty, grimed over by who knew how many summer rains and winter snows, but it was sealed tight and shatterproof, thick thermal pane glass, expensive. The entire thing was built on a concrete pad only slighter larger than the base of the shack, leaving a small lip all the way around. The concrete was sealed against the weather but too many years had gone by and it had begun to crumble a little along the edge.

“Somebody paid for the best,” Joel said. “Owning land up here, I reckon he could afford it.”

“Let’s go in,” she said, reaching for the knob of the only door the shack had, right around the corner from the side with the sole window. She turned it and sighed. “Locked.”

“I’ve got a shiv left. I’ll pop the lock in a second,” Joel said. “Let’s look around first.”

“‘Kay.”

There was a fire pit behind the shack. It had once been a ring of rocks and a patch of scorched dirty but nature had reclaimed it. Grass grew tall there and it would have to be pulled up and discarded before they could make a campfire. They busied themselves with the task. Fire first. Then they could settle in. Look for food. Wash their clothes.

Ellie was almost done with her side of the fire pit when she stopped to pick up a rock that she had kicked with her foot. It had rattled. Rocks weren’t supposed to rattle.

“What’s the deal with this weird rock?” she asked, holding it up to her ear, shaking it, listening to it rattle.

Joel smiled. The words he spoke meant nothing to her though he said them as though he had solved a real brainteaser of a riddle. Ellie was puzzled by the words but pleased by how happy he seemed when he said them.

“Nine dollars at Home Depot.”

**. . .**

The key fit the lock on the door.

“This,” she said, still holding the fake rock in her hands, peering inside it through the secret opening Joel had revealed, “is proof that you lived in a time of magic and wonder, Joel Miller.”

“I had a fake rock just like that one in my backyard,” he said, stepping inside the shack.

“In your flower garden?” Ellie teased, trying to squeeze around him. She wanted to be the first one inside the shack but she had to settle for a tie. She looked around in wonder. “Wow. This is the tiniest house I have ever been in.”

“If it’s too small for you, I’ll let you sleep outside in the sleepin’ bag,” he teased, tugging her ponytail daringly.

She shrieked and laughed and slapped at his hand.

“Ow! Jerk! You’re the one sleeping outside. And don’t pull my hair! You’re worse than the boys at the orphanage! They used to get spanked by the nuns for pulling the girls’ hair. And then I’d get spanked for beating the boys up. Everybody was getting spanked at that place, is what I’m telling you!”

She laughed, brimming with energy now, and continued to poke at him with a fingertip playfully even as she looked around, exploring the small area with him. It was small enough that he was never out of arm’s reach.

“You’re such a jerk,” she cooed, her eyes taking in all the new things.

A strange kind of carpeting was on the floor. Graphite in color and with a very tight weave. Marine carpeting, Joel would tell her later. No-slip and water-resistant. Durable. She rubbed the toe of her shoe against it and wondered what it would feel like against her skin when she took her shoes off after dinner.

“Seriously,” she said idly, dropping a hint, hoping he would take it. She didn’t dare to come right out and say it. “Those nuns spanked me all the damn time.”

“That a fact?” he said, smiling just a little, studying the timber of the walls. Old, but still tight and snug. The world outside hadn’t gotten inside this place yet. It wouldn’t anytime soon, either. Built to last. He wondered how much the owner had paid for such a place to be built out in the middle of the woods like this.

“Yep,” she said, blushing, hoping. “All the time.”

There was a fold down table mounted to the wall beneath the window with a pair of sturdy hinges and a pair of sturdy legs that unfolded neatly on their own set of hinges. There was a twin size bed built into a long nook in the wall. She pressed her hand against it, her vivid imagination beginning to spin a variety of novel scenarios involving her and Joel sleeping in a bed tonight. A brittle, thin foam mattress underneath a fitted sheet with another sheet over that. A thick blanket, quilted and warm, with a cool, decorative geometric pattern of browns and blues. They would be warm tonight, and off the ground. The sleeping bag was nice, but this was going to be amazing. She was sure of it.

“So many spankings,” she said as casually as she could, tensing up inside, desperate to make him understand what she wanted. “So, so many.”

“It ever occur to you to just behave and save yourself the trouble?” he asked, studying the ceiling. No water spots. No leaks.

“Nope,” she snickered.

“Why does that not surprise me?” he said dryly, prompting a girlish giggle from her and another poke of her finger.

There was a deck of cards on a little shelf by the window, sitting dusty and long-forgotten next to an empty bottle of McAdams Canadian Whiskey – ‘imported’, the red banner on the label proudly extolled.

“Look,” Ellie chirped from the corner, behind the open door. “A broom.”

She held it in both hands, triumphant.

“Good,” he said.

“I’ll sweep the dust out before we settle in for the night, okay?”

“That’s a plan,” he said as she leaned the broom against the edge of the bed. Already he was struggling with the images his brain was assailing him with. Pictures of him, her, and that bed. Sundown was still hours away. He tried not to think about what was going to happen later.

Might’ve been better if we’d never found this place, he thought.

She eased close to him, the heat from her body warming him in the enclosed space. Her eyes continued to drink in the details of the shack.

A few hooks on the wall, brass and rounded. For clothes? Or hunting gear? She didn’t know. There were two big blocks of rock near the wall, close to the foot of the bed, resting on bare patch of uncarpeted concrete, each square block the size of a paint can. Holes had been drilled through each stone and a thick steel wire had been looped through each one, making a crude carrying handle that, again, made her think of paint cans.

“What the deal with those rocks?” she asked, pointing unnecessarily.

“Soapstone,” Joel answered. “Heaters.”

“Oh yeah?” she asked, kneeling down in front of the stones, studying them, ready to learn.

“Yeah,” Joel said, easily falling into his role as her teacher. “Soapstone’s great for keepin’ you warm. It doesn’t crack or split when you heat it up. You can sit it right in the fire and it won’t hurt it. When it’s good and warm, you bring it inside and it’ll give off heat for hours and hours.”

“It’s so cool how you know all this stuff,” she said, rising to her feet, her face filled with adoration. “Who taught you all these camping tricks?”

“Dad,” Joel grunted. “He used to take me and Tommy campin’… when he wasn’t drunk.”

“Oh. All righty then,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck sheepishly. This man was a minefield sometimes.

“Long time ago,” he said, kneeling down to look under the bed. “Check those shelves, okay?”

There was a series of deep, short shelves built into the wall next to the head of the bed. Ellie knelt down and began to dig through the things stashed there, searching skillfully for anything useful.

A roll and a half of toilet paper wrapped up tightly and well preserved inside an old Albertson’s shopping bag.

“Oh thank you, God,” she enthused, hugging one of the soft rolls to her chest. “Toilet paper.”

“Good,” he said from the foot of the bed, pleased with her find.

The jumbo roll they had liberated from the Selby Sports Stadium had unfortunately sank with the Honda. The days since had been… less than pleasant.

She passed the smaller of the two rolls to him and placed the larger one inside her backpack, smiling appreciatively. “Man, if we don’t anything else useful here, this was worth the trip up this fucking mountain.”

“Sure you don’t want to save it for a special occasion?” Joel chided, setting the roll aside. “We still got quite a bit of that FEDRA newspaper left, the ‘American Sentinel’ that you read over and over. Only thing that paper was ever good for was wipin’ your ass.

“Har har,” she said. “Propaganda or not, that paper told me more about the time after the outbreak that my instructors at the school ever did. Ooh! Hey! Got some clothes for you here, maybe.”

Piece by piece, she pulled out a full set of clothes. Woolen socks. A sweater. Denim jeans. Underwear – jockey shorts, not the boxer-briefs Joel favored – white cotton. All dusty from sitting on the shelf for so long, but clean and in very good condition. She piled it all on the bed for him to try on later. Hopefully, some of it would fit him.

“They used to drop big bundles of that newspaper out of the back of planes flying out to all the cities they couldn’t or wouldn’t go to,” he said, holding up the sweater, judging it to be more or less a good fit for him. Good. It was getting cooler and damper every day now.

“Really?” she asked, holding up a flat, plastic pocket comb/brush with a stubby little handle molded in a mix of light and dark browns that gave it a cool turtle shell pattern. “Do you want this? Or can I have it?”

“Fine by me,” Joel said, glancing up once at it from his spot on the floor where he was looking under the bunk. “I already got a comb. Go on. Take it.”

She slipped it into her back pocket, next to the spare magazine for her pistol. No need for shotgun shells back there now.

_Plenty of room._

_Fuck, I miss my shotgun._

“I’d rather have a real brush,” she said. “But this is better than the dinky little pocket comb I’ve got.”

“Uh huh,” Joel said, not really hearing her as she continued perusing the knick-knacks on the shelf.

A black plastic mug. An oven mitt, for some reason, blue with silver trim. Maybe for moving the soapstone blocks? A small tube of super glue, all dried up inside, hard as a rock. A small cardboard box of stick matches, only three left – the lid of the box showed a cartoon woman, very shapely, with short black hair and sexy black underwear.

“‘Sue’s Fantasy Club’,” Ellie read aloud. “‘Elko, Nevada’.”

“What’d you say?” Joel asked, standing up and crossing to the small table by the window.

“Nothing,” Ellie replied. “Just reading this box of matches.”

“Hang on to those,” he said, and dropped to one knee to look at the plastic storage containers under the table. They looked to be filled with blankets and mothballs.

“Will do,” she said, reading the underside of the box silently.

            WHERE FANTASIES HAPPEN  
          Voted cleanest brothel in Elko

She didn’t know if Joel had ever been to a place like that. Part of her wanted to know, wanted to ask him a bunch of questions about brothels and why men went to them. Another part of her didn’t want to know. She was beginning to think of Joel and herself as a couple… or at least as something more than just traveling buddies. She didn’t want to think about Joel with other women. Joel should only be with her. The thought of other woman they might meet along their way to the Fireflies suddenly made her feel possessive of him.

_I want him to be all experienced and stuff. But I don’t want to know about any of it. Except… I kind of do… like I need to measure up or something… Fuck, I’m being dumb._

She pushed it out of her mind focused on the two small cans of food she found tucked in behind the sloppily folded sweater. She pulled them out and read the labels of the small cans, one in each hand.

_Van Camp Beanie Weenies - Original… Campbell’s Beans and Franks._

“Aren’t these the same things?” she asked, holding the cans up. “It’s all beanie weenies, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then why do they have different names?”

“Some advertiser’s bright idea, I reckon.”

“Oh. Okay.” She didn’t get it. Her voice gave it away.

_Dumb. But a lot of stuff from back then is dumb. I guess you just had to live in it to make sense of most of it._

She picked up the next item on the shelf. A small, metal box, rectangular, just big enough to fill her hand, and lighter, less heavy than the beanie weenies. The lid was a bright red plastic, the sides a colorful blend of blue, white, and red. She popped the lid off. Another lid, metal with a pull-tab, was underneath, sealing the can airtight. She held it up to study it and read the words printed thereon aloud.

“Got a sealed can of… French Vanilla…” she hesitated, before attempting the next word syllable by syllable, sounding it out phonetically. “Cap-pooh-chu-chu-eye-noh.”

Joel came out from under the edge of the table so hard and fast that he banged his head.

“OW! GODDAMMIT!” He rounded on her, startling the girl with his intensity. “What the hell did you just say?”

“I -” she began, eyes wide, standing up quickly, hands gripping the can, ready to hold it out for him, but he had already crossed the small space and snatched it out of her hand.

He leered at it. She had never seen him stare at something with such naked lust on his face.

“Did I do good?” she asked, grinning.

With a joyous whoop, can still in one hand, he wrapped his arms around her waist, scooped her up, and twirled her in circles around the small floor of the little shack.

She loved him. She loved seeing him so happy. She loved being in his arms and feeling how strong he was. She grinned manically, sharing his joy. She was a young woman in love. She wanted to fly.

**. . .**

The door was closed now, keeping the breeze at bay. They were all alone now. They had been for a long time. But inside the cozy cabin, sealed away together from the world outside, the intimacy of their relationship hung heavy and warm in the air between them. They could both feel it, but neither of them spoke of it.

There was an old paper sign affixed to the inside of the door with glossy enameled thumbtacks. It was thick cardstock paper and the letters were handmade, the dense black of the permanent marker having faded first to a purplish hue then to a faint, barely legible, ghostly violet-grey.

          Dont Leave the BEER in The pond!!!

“‘Maxwell House International’,” Ellie read from the can, sitting in one of the two folding metal chairs they’d found, perched on the edge of the seat, next to him as he sat at the table. “Is this a good kind of cappuccino? High quality and all that?” she asked, proud that she had pronounced it right – he’d only had to say it once or twice before she was able to wrap her mouth around the unusual word. She’d heard him say it before, somewhere along the trip, she couldn’t remember where exactly, but it was one of those words that didn’t sound the way it was spelled.

“Since there ain’t no other coffee left in the world? You’re damn right it’s a good kind.”

She laughed. He was still smiling. He had been the entire time as he finished unpacking their stuff, stacking it on the table and the floor beneath, separating it into general categories: Food, ammo, clothes, miscellaneous. She had left certain items in her backpack, out of sight, when she had pulled the majority of her things out to be sorted and inventoried.

“Cool. Can I have some?” she asked, scooting about in her chair to better face him.

“Nah. I’m gonna make you stand in the corner and watch me drink it,” he said dryly, his eyes twinkling.

“Ass,” Ellie snorted. “ _I found it_. Finders, keepers.”

He didn’t take the bait. He continued to dig around in his pack on his lap, fishing out a few loose pistol bullets that were rolling around at the bottom.

“Maybeeeeeee,” she teased, easing close to him, scooting her chair over until the seats were almost touching, “if you’re very nice to me, I _might_ let you have a small sip of my cappuccino. A teeny one. But only if you’re good. Deal?”

“Beatin’ stick,” Joel said, his eyes on his work, his voice flat, but his eyes crinkled at the corners with happiness. He carefully laid out their remaining ammunition. There was more here than he had expected to find. It had been a while since they had done a proper inventory.

She blew air through her lips and pushed at him gently with one hand, playing at shoving him away, hoping he would push back, lean into her a little. He didn’t, so she leaned into him. He slipped his arm around her waist and hugged her tight for a tragically too-brief moment before going back to work.

“I’m starting to suspect the beating stick is an urban legend,” she murmured sweetly, delighted to be so close to him in such a safe place.

“Shh,” Joel chuffed, his voice deep and low, amused. “I don’t want that gettin’ around. I got a reputation to protect.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” she whispered, leaning close, keeping his secret. “I don’t want people figuring out that you don’t keep me in line with regular beatings and spankings and stuff like that.”

She swallowed hard, grinning, hoping, her eyes narrow and shimmering.

“Keep talkin’ like that and one of these days you just might get one,” he goaded gently, his eyes on his work, the corner of his mouth tugging into a small smile. It made her wiggle in place just a little to hear him say it, he noticed.

“Um… you talking about a beating?” she leaned in again, her chin coming to rest on his shoulder, eyes daring him, the breath of her voice tickling his ear, her bottom lip tucked between her teeth as she finished speaking, almost giddy with barely suppressed excitement. “Or a _spanking?_ ”

“You know damn well what I mean,” he said, looking at her briefly, his eyes dark and smoldering.

She felt one large hand slide up along the curve of her hip, easing deftly around to rest on the top of her ass. Her throat clamped shut. Her body went stiff and she wanted to burst into flames. She shivered and giggled goofily instead. The rush of excitement flooding through her had to come out of her somehow, but why did she have to be such a goober at a moment like this?

_Good Ellie, this is Bad Ellie. Listen up! If you fuck this up, I swear I will kill us both. Act sexy! Don’t be a doof! Do something cool and sexy! Hurry!_

She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. She didn’t dare speak. She would only fuck this moment up worse if she did.

He brushed her bangs out her face and kissed her on the lips. She draped her forearms around his neck and moaned into his mouth. The kiss went on and on. She wanted to kiss him until she was old and gray. She turned in place in her chair, trying to get as close to him as she possibly could. You had to be comfortable when a kiss was going to last forever.

Finally he eased away, parting their lips. She leaned in, brushing her cheeks against his, whispering into his ear, his beard prickly against the edge of her mouth.

“Y’know, if you _do_ wanna spank me,” she cooed, “I probably deserve it.”

“I know you do,” he growled and pulled her ponytail, making her gasp, bending her head back, covering her lips with his. She mewled, her body suddenly aflame, blazing, needing. He covered her ass with his other hand as they kissed. She waited, hoping, pushing his bottom against his palm, desperate and ready.

_Nice job, Good Ellie. I guess I’ll let you stick around for a while longer, boo._

“Spank me,” she moaned as his tongue slipped from her mouth, her lust making her bold. She whispered to him, her heavily lidded eyes locked on his, “I’m serious. I want you to.”

“First things first,” he said, kissing her jaw, her neck, caressing one of her breasts through her shirt. “We gotta get washed up and do some laundry while there’s still a plenty of daylight.”

“Are you saying I stink?” she snarked.

“You wanna get naked or not, girl?” he smirked.

“Race you there!” she whooped, squeezing past him to get through the door first, darting out into the forest and the cool air, laughing happily.

_Laundry day! Naked time! Spankings! This is going to be the best day in the history of the world!!_

**. . .**

“You sure this pond water is safe to drink?” Ellie asked, tugging the shoulder strap of her tank top back into place. Her shorts were soaking wet and her shirt was getting wet too.

“Should be,” Joel said from the tall grass at the edge of the pond. “It doesn’t taste funny or smell weird, but we put purification tablets in there just to be sure. And we filled up all our water bottles before we took our baths and wash our clothes. So there’s no soap or anything in our canteens, yeah?”

“Yeah,” she said, splashing a little water at him with a playful slap. It didn’t reach him, falling well short of the shore, but it was the thought that counted.

The water where she stood was only two feet deep. Another few steps away from the shore and it dropped off sharply to depths so deep and murky that it made her uneasy to contemplate them. But shallow water was better than no water. This pond would do.

They’d both had a bath. He’d given her a little privacy while she bathed though she wished he hadn’t. The campsite was set up now. This place would serve as a nice home for a night, at least, though she was hoping for more. A week here would be perfect, in her opinion.

She grinned at the thought of staying here for a while. They could have a bath every day in this place, just like the Big Darby Park back in Ohio. She liked the idea of watching him bathe on a regular basis.

She wasn’t a very good sentry today, she knew. She’d watched him soap up from her place on the edge of the pond, rifle in her hands, keeping a lookout just to be sure. She liked seeing him naked. She didn’t even try to hide it now. She giggled to herself shamelessly and pushed her wet, unbound hair out of her face. It felt good to have clean hair again. They were both clean. It felt great not to stink. It was nice watching him walk around shirtless in nothing but his sweatpants.

The shampoo was all used up now. The soap was almost gone too. She did her best to make it last as she washed her filthy clothing. She worked the soapy denim against itself carefully, with great determination, trying to apply extra soap only where she had to. But despite her best efforts, the tiny sliver of soap finally evanesced away into nothingness. She muttered darkly. These jeans were still dirty.

She waded to the shore and pulled her last bar of soap out of the ziploc baggie. The wrapper on the bar had been opened earlier and tightly folded closed again. It puzzled her until she unwrapped it and saw the toothmarks on the corner of the soap.

_Oh my God! I remember this! This is the bar of soap I nibbled on back at the Motel 6. I was drunk and I decided that anything that smelled this good must be delicious. Oh wow! I hid this at the bottom of the pile and forgot all about it until just now!_

“Did somebody chew on that bar?” Joel asked, looking down at her and the soap in her hand.

“Looks like,” she said, sounding even more puzzled than him. “Or maybe they’re fingernail marks? Dunno. Weird, right?”

Blushing, she waded back out into the water as quickly as she could, recovering her submerged jeans and resumed washing her clothes, keeping her back to him for a while, just in case.

He said nothing, trying to look at the clouds in the sky and not the wet, barely dressed girl in the pond.

Dunked and swirled the jeans. Squeezed and wrung, working the soap out of the fabric, replacing it with clean water. She knew she wasn’t supposed to wring. Joel said that twisting the clothes would just wear it out faster. But she was in a hurry to finish. She wanted to get to dinner. She wanted to spend time with him. She wanted to be done with laundry. She wanted to sit next to him. Talk. Kiss. Feel his hands on her body. Maybe make love in the grass.

She was yanked back to reality when Joel unexpectedly told her to go ahead and wash her shorts and tank top too.

“But…” she began, her heart pounding. “I’m still wearing them.”

“Take ‘em off then.”

“Umm… you gonna turn around? Or…”

“Nope,” he said. “Gotta keep an eye on you. Don’t want you fallin’ into the deep end or somethin’.”

She tittered, bubbled with laughter, a goofy, exuberant sound. She blushed from head to toe. With shaking hands, she began to undress, not turning away from him. She wanted him to see. She couldn’t stop grinning. She couldn’t look at him, but she could feel his eyes on her. Her throat was tight. Her heart raced. Her face beamed. Her teeth flashed in the sun, sparkling brightly, like the water she stood in, completely naked now, just for him.

“Good girl,” he said.

“Thanks,” she peeped, grinning, draping her shirt over one bare shoulder, and dunked her shorts into the water.

She washed while he watched. She couldn’t make eye contact with him. She was too naked to be that daring. She was too naked to stop smiling either. Her face would be sore tomorrow from all the grinning she was doing. She worked slowly, careful not to twist or wring the cotton. She was in no hurry. She wanted to do this the right way. She wanted to take her time. She wanted him to see that she paid attention to the lessons he had taught her. She wanted his praise. She wanted him to see her the same was she was seeing her own reflection in the water. Naked. Young. Bold. In love.

She had never felt so sexy in all her life.

His discarded sweatpants landed on her head. He laughed.

“Gah!” she exclaimed affectionately. “ _I’m washing your fucking clothes too?!_ This is blatant sidekick abuse, you dick! I swear! The things I do for you!”

He was naked too, she knew. But it was a good minute or more before she worked up the nerve to look with shy, hungry eyes.

_We’re staying here a week. At least. I’ll beg him if I have to._

**. . .**

The clothes they had found in the cabin fit him well enough. The jeans were a bit loose. People were heavier back then. More food to eat. The sweatshirt looked good on him too.

_Oh man! I can’t believe I’m actually doing this!_

She was naked. All of her clothes were drying in the sun, spread out on the grass, away from the shade.

_I’m running around camp naked, just like he said I would be, back on the highway, back when we had the bike._

_I never thought he’d actually make me do it!_

She grinned. She had been walking around naked for a few hours now. She had stopped blushing, but her heart still raced every time she realized how she must look to him, a thought that came to her almost constantly, of course.

_Fuck! I’m naked! I’m so fucking naked! Anybody could see me like this!_

She giggled quietly and hugged herself. It was still warm. In another hour or so, when the sun went behind the crest of the ridge, it was going to get chilly.

_Probably won’t be so much fun then._

_God, I hope he’ll let me put on some clothes when it gets dark!_

She grinned, running her fingers through the thick grass where she was kneeling.

_God, I kinda hope he doesn’t! What if he makes me stay naked all the time? Fuck, I hope he does. I like this. It’s like Eden and stuff. It’s embarrassing, but in a good way._

She tugged a few blades of grass free from the earth and studied them. She couldn’t stop smiling.

_I’m such a perv!_

“Hope you’re not thinkin’ of makin’ a grass skirt, girl,” Joel chided, arranging bits of wood into a small pile. “Because that ain’t allowed either.”

“I know,” she tittered. “No clothes. That’s what you said.”

“That’s right,” he nodded, in a way that indicated no compromise was possible, fishing the box of matches from the pocket of his new pants.

“Cause you’re a dirty old man,” Ellie sniggled. “Admit it.”

“That’s right too,” he answered breezily.

The wood they had gathered from the hillside was a little damp from the recent rains. He used some of the dryer lint they’d been saving, wrapping it in few pages taken from her old copy of The Wall Street Journal.

“If I was wearing pants,” she began, challengingly, “then I could use my Hello Kitty lighter to start that fire.” Her eyes darted over to him. Her face was beaming, enjoying teasing him, enjoying the things he was making her do today. “But I seem to have misplaced my pants for some reason.”

He barked a short, sharp laugh before settling into the mentor voice she loved so much. “We’re gonna use the box of matches you scrounged up instead. Our lighters travel better, so we oughta use up the fragile matches first.”

“Good idea,” she nodded, forgetting she was naked for a brief moment, filing away this new lesson for future use.

The small pile of kindling caught quickly. He carefully arranged larger pieces of wood over the flame, tending it, helping it grow large and bright. She held out her hands, making a dramatic show of warming them.

“Chilly today for some reason, doncha think?” she winked. “Or is that just me?”

He stood up, holding out a hand to help her to her feet. She accepted it and as he pulled her up, the physical contact with him made her feel even more excitingly exposed.

“C’mon, Red,” he said. “Let’s get those stone blocks in the fire and we can get dinner started. After that, the laundry ought to be dry. We can gather it up and get it inside before it gets dark.”

“These clothes you speak of,” she grinned, sticking close to him as they walked around to the door of the cabin, “do you think any of them might find their way onto the body of a certain scrawny sidekick?”

_But not too scrawny? Right?_

“What do you think?” he asked, holding the door open for her.

She was grinning like a loon, chortling goofily, as she boldly strode past him and went inside, his eyes taking her in with every daring step.

“Man, I was sure you’d be sick of looking at my skinny butt by now, dude.”

“Girl, you look so good, you’ll be damn lucky if I don’t march you all the way to Tommy’s like this.”

She cackled, overjoyed, feeling beautiful, and punched him lightly in the chest as he followed her inside the shack.

**. . .**

The single plexiglass window looked out on the pond and the trees between it and the cabin. A deer was down there, drinking from the water. A second, smaller deer stood nearby, watching the shack warily, looking at the nude, redheaded girl who stood inside, watching the animals, a can opener in her hand. Ellie held up a hand in greeting. The deer didn’t return the gesture, but that was okay. Ellie didn’t mind. Deer didn’t have hands.

_This place is so damn cool._

The deer pranced off into the woods on the far side of the pond, working their way up the hill, disappearing into the thick line of obscuring trees. They emerged briefly at the top of the ridge, silhouetted against the sky, and then they were gone.

_I could stay here forever._

“You get lost in there?”

Joel’s voice came to her through the open door. He was outside, behind the shack, cooking dinner.

“On my way!” she called, scampering across the carpet and out into the sunlight, as fleet and sleek as any deer of the forest, and even more graceful.

She smiled warmly when she rounded the corner and saw the look of desire that washed across Joel’s face at the sight of her.

“Jeez, Joel. Don’t get your panties in a bunch, okay? As you can see, I didn’t!”

She laughed and so did he. It bounced off the bowl of the hills, coming back to her like musical notes. She plopped down beside him, her breasts jiggling and sighed happily as he draped an arm around her bare shoulders. Over the fire, there was a pan of water just beginning to bubble on the folding metal rack of his camp stove. A can of beanie weenies was in his hand. The pan from her camp set was nearby, unfolded and ready to use.

“Here’s your can opener. Now show me how to make coffee.”

**. . .**

She was babbling, making all sorts of small talk as she collected the laundry from the grass. The shadows were growing long. The sun would slip behind the ridge soon. She was still talking about the instant cappuccino. No doubt, the caffeine that was surging through her body filled her with a level of energy unaccustomed even to a blabbermouth like her.

“Shit!” she was saying. “That stuff was really good. I can see why you went to coffee shops all the time. Man, I would’ve gone to them too. That stuff’s way better than any fruit punch I ever had. Or that crappy orange drink they used to serve sometimes. It’s even better than lemonade and I fucking love lemonade, you know?”

She stopped suddenly, her arms full of shirts and socks.

“Am I talking too much?” she asked, turning her head to see him over her shoulder, showing him the curves of her ass, making it hard for him to focus on the words she was saying. “I feel like I’m talking too much all of a sudden.”

“First time in your life you’re feelin’ that, I bet,” he said, stooping to pick up the sleeping back. It has lain in the sun for most of the day, unzipped and spread open. The fresh air had worked a small miracle on the inside lining. It smelled almost clean now.

“Oh ho ho!” she smiled. “Look at you, making jokes and stuff. Coffee put you in a good mood too, I see.”

She scooped up the last of the socks and dashed over to him.

“C’mon, Joel,” she enthused, brushing against him tantalizingly. “Take your clothes off already. We should both be naked! This is the perfect spot for it!”

“Is that so?” he asked as she trotted alongside him, hugging the last of the laundry tightly to her chest, hiding her breasts from his eyes. His mind filled in the concealed places easily now.

“Mm-hmm,” she nodded quickly, reassuringly. “This is the perfect place for LOTS of stuff.”

“Like what?” he replied.

“Like… um… being naked… together…” she answered, pretending to scan a mental list hovering in the air in front of her. “Sleeping naked together… doing other cool naked stuff together… sexy stuff… _grownup_ stuff… you know?”

Joel chuckled and said nothing.

“I’m a _grownup_ , Joel,” she declared proudly. “You know I am. I mean, I’m not all old and grumpy and stuff like the way you are…”

And here she paused while he opened the door for her and she strutted inside.

“But I’m still a grownup,” she continued. “More or less. I mean, pretty much. Right?”

“You’re pretty much grownup, I reckon,” he answered, rolling the sleeping bag up while she began to fold their laundry.

“I wish my boobs were bigger,” she said offhandedly, rolling up her favorite red shirt. “But I’m still holding out hope.”

He answered, “Your boobs are just fine, girl. You got a fine pair. Don’t even worry about them.”

She grinned and bounced in place, stepping from foot to foot, the carpet an intriguing texture against her soles, just as she had expected it be.

“Wasn’t fishing for compliments. I swear,” she offered. “Buuuuuutttttt… If you wanna say anything nice about any other parts of me, I’m giving you an opening, buddy. Just FYI and stuff.”

Joel laughed agreeably and the sound warmed her.

He stepped close and draped her green woolen army blanket around her shoulders.

“Let’s go outside and bring those stones in. Get this place good and warm before the sun goes down. Then we can talk about your sweet little ass and those nice legs of yours. Just as much as you want. Yeah?”

She raised an eyebrow skeptically, turning around to face him as he placed his hands on her shoulders. She pulled the blanket snug around herself, tugging it for dramatic effect. “Does this count as clothes? Am I breaking your new pervo rules?”

He kissed her forehead.

She spoke from beneath his chin in a voice laced with saucy mirth.

“I’m going to get a spanking for wearing this, aren’t I?”

“Damn right you are,” he said and delighted as a faint shiver passed through her.

“I feel like I was set up,” she purred and let him lead her outside again.

**. . .**

He was seated close to the window. He was dressed. All of the rest of their clothing was stacked carefully on the table. She was standing in front of him. She was naked. She was nervous. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she tugged on her fingertips and pressed the sides of her hands against her belly.

“You gettin’ shy on me, wild child?”

“No,” she murmured in a tiny voice. “It’s not like I haven’t done this in front of you before… Just… not, you know… where you could really see what I was doing. That’s all.”

“You don’t want me to watch?”

“I do,” she peeped. “I’m… nervous… that’s all.”

“I won’t watch your hands then. Just your face.”

“Um… Is that more embarrassing? Or less?” she burbled, nervous, smiling, blushing severely. Cute. Adorable as hell. “I can’t tell.”

“I’ll just watch your hands then,” he soothed, a lopsided quarter-smile on his face.

“Oh man,” she squeaked, drawing in a deep breath and placing her hands over her exposed sex. She nodded, summoning up all her courage. “Okay…. Okay. Here we go.”

Ellie looked down and to her relief, her loose hair fell forward, partially obscuring her face. She could see down the length of her body. Her feet were turned slightly inward. She always stood a little pigeon-toed when she was nervous. Her stomach was flat, of course. She never had enough to eat, it seemed. Her ever-hungry belly was rising and falling so fast she marveled that she wasn’t hyperventilating. Her legs looked long from up here. Earlier today, Joel said she had nice legs and she felt that maybe he was right about that. Her hips flared out nicely from her waist, a very feminine shape to her eyes. Her breasts were too small to suit her, but at least she had something on her chest. Two somethings, in fact. Soft, shapely swells that were pressed together by her upper arms, making nice line of cleavage. Her pink nipples were puckered tightly at the center of her small areolas, two eye-catching rocks, hard and jutting out appealingly towards him where he sat, waiting, watching.

She watched her fingers down at the very bottom of her belly as they began to push their way through her pubic hair, working their way around the curve of her quivering mound, and disappear out of sight, like the deer had earlier, lost to the concealment of auburn curls. She couldn’t see very much of her pussy, of course. No woman could. It was different for boys and their dumb boy stuff all out there in front. Boys were always so proud of their silly dangling parts. It wasn’t like that for Ellie. She wasn’t proud she was apprehensive. Did she look okay? Did he like what he was seeing? He could see it a lot better from where he was sitting than she could. She’d only ever showed it to one other person, and that was another girl. Girls were different. She understood girls. Girls made sense. It was boys that were the weird ones. And the few that weren’t weird were still strange when it came to girls and their bodies and what they wanted from them if even she wanted that too for reasons that that were as much of a mystery to her as boys were and they were, every girl knew that. Boys were dumb and pushy and mysterious, somehow, when it came to stuff like this even though they seemed to be pretty simple about almost everything else like Kevin and the other boys who drilled a hole in the shower wall just so they could see the girls taking a bath and that was so gross at the time but she’d let a boy watch her take a bath today and she loved how it felt while he watched her do the very thing she’d kicked Kevin in the balls for doing just a year before and she wondered if boys even thought about this kind of stuff or if they just did stuff without thinking about it because of reasons that only made sense to them. She knew this one didn’t spend nearly as much time in his own head as she did hers. She just wanted him to like what he saw to like what she was showing him to like it and to like her or at least not be grossed out or whatever it was a boy felt when he didn’t like something. And her something was already partly open from the incredible amount of excitement she was feeling. Her nervous fingers set about opening it up a little more so she could play with it for him, like he asked her to do and like she’d agreed to do for some reason must have made sense to her at the time but now she wanted to go back in time and kick Past Ellie’s ass for saying yes when she should have run screaming into the woods instead to live out the rest of her life like a nun away from boys and their big arms and their eyes that saw everything and their beards and their hard-ons that pants could never quite hide and all their dirty thoughts and the way they could judge a girl just with their eyes and make her feel embarrassed about stuff that was nothing to be ashamed about and parts of herself that were perfectly normal and not weird at all and squeaky clean and freshly washed and super duper wet but not from the soapy water but from the moistness that appeared whenever this boy looked at her like the way he was looking at her now and making her feel horny and shy and ready to fuck and ready to run away and ready for kissing and ready for touching and ready for this thing she was doing right now or so Past Ellie had thought but that’s because Past Ellie was really Bad Ellie and now Good Ellie was stuck with the decisions that Bad Ellie had made and everything down there was wide open and he was looking at all her stuff and she was afraid he was going to look up at her at any moment and she would die of embarrassment if he did but maybe that was better than showing herself to him like this and it felt so good and so right to let him see and she watched his eyes watching her fingers as she rubbed and stroked the parts of herself that felt so fucking good and she was so wet and she was starting to make sounds she couldn’t hold inside no matter how much she tried and her fingers were moving faster and the words ‘do I look okay?’ slipped out of her traitorous mouth which was an even worse thing for it to do than to make those awful moans and groans and Joel’s voice came out all deep and dark and sexy and the words he made sounded like ‘goddamn, you’re beautiful, girl’ and ‘this is the prettiest little pussy i’ve ever seen’ and she made a horribly humiliating groan-squeak of relief and fuck her fingers were moving so fast and now his hands were on her thighs rubbing up and down and inside and out and around her legs and making sure to do it all slowly and not rush her or get his hands too close to her pussy and the little fingers that were working the flesh furiously making a wet, squishing sound between her legs while the calluses of his palms were so coarse and amazing and fucking magical on the silken skin of her inner thighs and his big hands were so close to her frantic fingers and her dripping pussy and she was shuddering and there were lights at the edges of her vision and her eyes were closing and she was rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet and bending a little at the knees and her ass was clenched tight and her stomach was a flat hard board and her poor pussy was beginning to spasm and she heard herself crying out a name that she hoped was his oh god how she hoped it was his name because she had been thinking about Riley for a minute and how awful would it be for her to say somebody else’s name at a time like this and his hands were on her waist holding her up holding her steady as she gasped and shuddered and clenched her toes against the weird carpet and he was telling her how good of a girl she was his good girl in fact that’s what she thought she heard and she wouldn’t let herself believe anything else and how proud he was of her he said that too but he didn’t say he loved her because Joel didn’t say things like that and she wondered if maybe she should say it first just to get it out there and maybe she should tell him how much she loved him and how she wanted to be with him forever and the taste of her pussy was smoky-sweet-salty-sticky on her fingers and why the fuck were her fingers in her mouth but she knew the answer of course because it was from force of habit she knew it for a fact and she knew because she usually tasted herself when she was done and she didn’t know why she did it but she’d always done that after doing this whether she had audience or not and Riley knew she did and never judged her and Joel wasn’t Riley and he was going to think she was some kind of freak and she had to take her fingers away from her tongue right fucking now before Joel got grossed out and ran off screaming into the woods to be a monk and –

“s-sssorry” she gasped, trying to make her rebellious fingers into a sloppy, loose fist to get them away from her face even though she knew it was too late and he was grossed out by what she’d done because boys didn’t understand anything because boys never thought about what girls-

Joel gently pulled her hand down to him, uncurled her fist with his fingers, and slipped one of her slick, small digits into his mouth. He sucked gently, cleaning it.

“ohhh mmmmannnn” she groaned, panting, her eyes wide despite how heavy her lids were. She could feel her legs go wobbly. Her pussy went limp, tingling, quavering, as awed as she was by this moment.

“Girl,” he said, easing her finger away from his lips, looking up at her, finding her beautiful green eyes shimmering behind the red veil of her hair. “You are sweeter than summer wine.”

She smiled but she couldn’t manage to bring her rows of teeth together. She was still breathing too hard. She wanted to squeal with joy. She wiggled in place instead, grinning like loon.

_Be cool! Don’t say thanks! Don’t say tha-_

“thanks” she whispered.

_Agh! What the fuck am I going to do with you, boo?!?_

**. . .**

The sun had slipped below the top of the high ridge of hills that encircled the little cabin. There was still another hour or more before it dipped below the unseen horizon and darkness fell over Wyoming, but the light coming through the window was softer than it had been before. To Ellie, the extended twilight glow made everything seem just a little more magical than normal: the cabin, the woods outside, the smell of the coffee lingering in the air. All of it was otherworldly and enchanting in a way that made them seem somehow not quite real. His kisses were the most magical thing of all.

She sat sideways across Joel’s lap, her arms around his neck, her feet dangling and swinging slowly, keeping time with the languid rhythm of her blissful heart. She was naked, of course, and he was still clothed. She wanted to change that. He needed to join her in the joy of being bare and warm and loved and cherished in this tiny, otherworldly house that had been spirited out of the pages of her treasured art books and found its way into the wilds of Wyoming, all cute and little and adorable and oh so perfect for just the two of them.

His hand was on the small of her back, supporting her, holding her close and safe against him. His other hand roamed the length of her thigh, her hips, her flank, her ribs, her shoulder. Every inch of her rejoiced at his touch and she wanted him to touch her like that forever. She could make a garden behind this shack and a gnome would come out of the woods and keep a watchful eye on it at night and she and this man could stay here forever and everything would be perfect and safe and awesome, just her, Joel, and Waffles the gnome. She would call him Waffles even though his name would probably be Sven or Dieter or Bjorn or something like that. Waffles wouldn’t mind the nickname. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Joel was kissing her neck, his beard so incredibly coarse and manly and such a nice contrast to his softer lips. Not soft like Riley’s had been, but soft enough.

_I’m drunk, Riley… I’m drunk from him… from his kisses… and his hands… I’m drunk…_

_Please be okay with this, Riley… Please…_

“oh god” she sighed rapturously “that feels so good”

“You’re drivin’ me crazy, girl,” Joel husked against her throat, his deep voice tinged with a need that he couldn’t hide. “We probably oughta put the brakes on this thing.”

“no” she moaned clutching at his neck and back “we need to keep going… thats what we need to do…”

She reached up to run her fingers through his hair, dark with just a little gray peppering it in a way that spoke to her of wisdom and experience and confidence. When she lifted her arm, she made room for his wandering hand to find her breast. She shuddered as his palm glided easily to it, cupping it, squeezing it.

“mmm” she shivered appreciatively “keep going”

His thumb traced circles around her tingling nipple. She bit her lower lip and groaned.

“so good”

Her hands began to pull his shirt up his back. She could reach the hem at his waist, so she gathered it in handfuls, pulling it up in waves of fabric until she could close her fingers around the bottom of the garment. She worked it up as high as she could, until it was bunched under his armpits.

“off… this has gotta come off…”

Joel leaned forward, trying to lift his arms up while still keeping her on his lap. It wasn’t going to happen. She slid off nimbly and stood up, helping him to pull the sweater over his head with small, determined hands.

“Here. Here,” she urged, tugging it free of his arms. “Here we go. Good. Cool.”

She looked at him, appreciating his form, her eyes dancing over him, his shirt wadded up in her hands. She wanted to bounce in place, grinning, barely holding herself still at the sight of him.

“You look better without a shirt,” she said approvingly.

“So do you,” he said.

She giggled and wiggled excitedly, just a little, not too much. Appreciatively. Still cool.

Her entire body was flushed with desire, giving her pale skin a faint pinkish glow. She was young, not fully in possession of the curves she would soon have as a grown woman, but her radiant youth lent her a certain willowy beauty in this brief transition from girl to woman. Joel pushed the notions of her age from his mind and tried to think only of the moment. She pivoted to toss the sweater on the bed, giving Joel a good view of her the side of her ass. His cock, already hard, began to hammer at the prison of his jeans.

Jesus, this girl’s got one helluva a fine ass, he thought to himself guiltily.

I’ve been telling you that since Ohio, his cock grumbled.

She reached out with one hand to touch his shoulder, to feel his muscles. Her red bush caught the light of the waning day, glossy and full and thick. His cock reminded him of all the little jokes she’d made lately about getting spanked. He remembered teasing her about turning her over his knee and paddling her while he fingered her on the motorcycle. The words had been the nudge she needed to send her plunging headlong into bliss. He was sure of it now. Just getting her to imagine him spanking her had helped to quickly bring her to climax.

That ass needs a good spanking, his cock prodded him. And that girl deserves one. Hell, she _wants_ one. Buddy, she damn well _needs_ one.

“Get down here, Ellie,” he heard himself say, his voice firm, commanding.

She grinned and moved to sit down on his lap.

“No,” he ordered. “Lay down. Here,” he patted the tops of his thighs, “across my lap.”

She froze for a second, mouth slightly open, eyes wide. Uncertain. Afraid she was misunderstanding. Hoping. Scared. Desperate. Wanting. She made a tiny squeak of timid lust. It slipped out before she could stop it.

“You lie down now, Ellie. I’m not gonna say it again. It’s way past time you got a good spankin’.”

“you…” she peeped, “you serious?”

“ _Now_ , Ellie.”

She almost threw herself across her lap, scrambling in place, his thighs denim-rough against the tender belly. She grunted as they dug into her belly while she levering herself into position. It had been years since Sister Anne or Sister Cecilia had turned her over their knees for a spanking. She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was bigger, longer, than she used to be. But Joel was bigger than any of the nuns. His lap was a good fit. She was quite comfortable here. She trembled and shook, one nervous hand grasping his calf for support, the other hand just reaching the odd carpet, holding herself up. As she wiggled, making the last, small adjustments necessary, the coarse denim around his legs teased the underside of her breasts.

“oh fuck,” she moaned, her body rigid and trembling with anticipation.

“No talking,” Joel told her.

“Right. Sorry,” she responded quickly, trying her best to not wiggle or squirm.

“ _No talking_ ,” he repeated.

She nodded, ratcheting her jaw closed. She had so much to say. She had a million questions, a billion observations, a zillion requests, but she forced herself to stay silent.

“Talkin’ is just gonna get you more smacks on the ass, girl,” he informed her.

“Oh God, this is turning me on so much,” she gushed, grinning wildly, trying to look back at him over her shoulder, twisting around, needing to see him.

He pushed her down, back into place, with a firm hand. She squealed sweetly, overjoyed, overpowered, and a little scared.

“Not…” she began with no small amount of trepidation, her body wiggling despite her best efforts at remaining still. “Not too hard… okay?”

He rested his hand across her bare ass cheeks and she went stiff, her voice barely able to squeeze past her suddenly constricted throat.

“Hard,” she gasped, grinning. “But not _too_ hard. Okay, Joel? … Please?”

He massaged the plump, round globes of her bottom. She trembled and squirmed.

“okay?” she repeated in a tiny, thrilled voice, trying to look at him again.

His left hand left her waist and gently gripped the back of her head, turning it in the direction of the cabin before returning to hold her fast. She giggled breathlessly and tried very hard not to squirm.

His right hand lifted up to hover over her ass. For a moment there was nothing but the agonizing excitement of anticipation.

**Smack!**

“OH!” she exclaimed in the moment between the sound, the realization, and the hot rush of pleasure-pain that came surging into her brain a heartbeat later.

**Smack!**

“Oh fuck!”

**Smack!**

“Fuck!”

**Smack! Smack!**

“FUCK!!”

**Smack! Smack! Smack!**

She grunted and groaned, hissing, grimacing, her teeth clenched now, as the open palm of his hand fell across her backside in a steady rhythm.

**Smack! Smack! Smack! Smack!**

“Nnng!” she groaned through her teeth, clutching at his calf muscle with her small hand, delicate fingers twisting the denim between her knuckles, her other hand pressed against the carpet, fingers splayed, fingernails feeling the tight knight of the waterproof fibers, the balls of her feet arched almost painfully high, toes spread, trying to find purchase against the floor, trying to hold herself in place dutifully for her punishment. “G’dd!!”

**Smack! Smack! Smack!**

Her back arched. He held her in place with one strong arm across her waist. She writhed and grunted. Her ass rippled with each impact of his hand. Tears wetted her cheeks, squeezing out from the edges of eyes screwed tightly shut. Her bangs danced about as she threw her head back and cried out. Her legs were wide now, trying to stabilize her, keep in her place on his lap even as her twisting and wiggling torso threatened to unseat her from her spot. She was at war with herself. She wanted to get away. She wanted to stay. She wanted to cover her ass. She wanted to push it closer to his hand. Her pussy throbbed and burned as intently as her poor ass. She wanted him to spank her there too. She wanted to feel that cruel hand on her broiling cunt. She knew she had to be dripping. She wanted to hear the wet smack of his hand on her pussy. She wanted him to spank her cunt. Hard. She wanted to come from it.

**Smack! Smack!**

“Ffffk!” she hissed, her fingers digging painfully into the muscle of his leg, both arms wrapped around his leg now. Her body was taut. She trembled and shook. Her ass was an incendiary, jiggling mound of hot coals. Her tits ached and tingled, the tender skin finding bliss in the rough texture of his denim jeans. Her pussy, ignored in favor of her ass, scorned her, cursed her, burned her, craving his touch. She wanted to come so bad it made her entire body shake. The tears were flowing, hot and wet, dripping down her face. A similar trickle of lust and shame fell from her scalding cunt. “Ghhhddd!”

**Smack!**

Her pussy was scorching her, hotter than her throbbing, abused ass. Wet. Trembling. Yearning. Head to toe. All of her. Kindling becoming flame.

**Smack!**

And then it was done.

She went limp, held in place by gentle hands. She gasped and tried to remember how long it had been since she had bothered to breathe.

“… oh…. oh wow… fffuck…”

Her whole body was slack, spent, utterly worn out.

“… oh man… joel…”

He kneaded her ass, working his fingers into the agonized flesh, taking the sting out, leaving only a wonderful, deep heat behind.

“… hhhhhhh…”

No words. She didn’t have words anymore. She made a deep, erotic moan instead.

His hand slipped between her spread thighs. A keening, needful sound spilled from her open lips. His palm cupped her boiling cunt and he began to work her engorged outer lips with his fingers, pinching them, squeezing them, working them back and forth, pressing them tightly together, using them to work her hard little clit.

She gasped, wailed, sobbed. His other hand began to spank her again and she held on to him for dear life. Her mistreated ass protested in agony. Her desperate little sex erupted with convulsions of pleasure. It was excruciating bliss. Confusing. Overwhelming. Incredible. She made wild, incoherent, sounds and her pussy and her ass sent very different messages to her brain. Tears. Sobs. Wailing sounds of mingling ecstasy and torment. She was saying his name. Or trying to. The loud slaps of her inflamed, reddened ass. The squishing wet sounds of her swollen, compressed pussy. Sobs of agony. Sobs of delight. She was crying and coming and wailing and willing and the room was spinning and he wasn’t stopping and he was never going to stop and she couldn’t decide if this was heaven or hell and she knew she wanted to stay forever, be owned forever, be punished forever, climax forever, hurt forever.

Love.

Forever.

He was done. She couldn’t remember when he had stopped. She lay there, panting, and trembling. Sniffling. Moaning. He patted her tender, throbbing ass affectionately, drawing a wordless, sexual sound from her that she didn’t know she was capable of making.

“C’mon,” he said gently. “Get up. Stand up, girl.”

She did, easing off his lap clumsily, practically on all fours, grunting, gasping, and forcing herself to stand up on wobbly legs, knowing she was naked and he wasn’t and he was going to be able to see everything: her little tits, her freckled cheeks wet with tears, the pattern the denim had embossed on her belly, the matted curls that couldn’t hide how puffy and fat her pussy had become, the wetness running down the inside of her thighs. Her skin glowed with perspiration brought out from passion and exertion. She trembled, shaking.

He was sexy, shirtless, and slightly out of focus as she stood before him. She felt dumb and ashamed and she wasn’t sure why. She sniffled and wiped at the tears on her cheeks with the heels of her hands. They wouldn’t stop flowing no matter how she tried to blink them away.

“Wanna sit down in my lap?” he asked, patting the top of his thighs.

She nodded wordlessly and moved to sit down sideways, like she had done before.

“No,” he said, reaching out to part her thighs, pulling her closer, helping her to widen her stance as she came in for a landing. “Like this.”

She straddled him, her thighs on either side of his hips, and settled into place. She placed her arms around his neck and tried to bury her face against his neck so he couldn’t see her cry. She felt dumb and cherished and safe and deeply, deeply relaxed.

Joel carefully brushed her damp bangs away, tucking them behind her ears. He hugged her and kissed her forehead. She nuzzled close, wordlessly. Her nipples were still tingling, desperate for attention, and the coarse stiffness of his chest hair felt amazing against them. Her pussy throbbed and pulsed, sizzling hot, and she could feel the hardness of his cock as she eased her hips in such a way as to bring her swollen mound as close to him as possible. She craved contact with him, as much as she could get.

“Th’s is a li’l embarassin’” she lamented, breathing deeply, smelling the Motel 6 soap on his skin. Her pussy was scalding her. It felt loose and flabby to her, fatter than she could remember it being before. She sniffled and kept her face safely turned away from him. Her body was glossy with sweat. “You probably think I’m a weirdo, huh?”

“Beautiful,” he replied in a deep, rumbling voice that made her searingly hot loins go limp, “I’m pretty sure you’re not the first woman in the history of this messed up world of ours who enjoyed herself a good spankin’ every now and then.”

She hugged him and sighed appreciatively, burrowing her face even deeper into his neck and shoulder. The tears were still seeping out, but for even more reasons now. She was feeling more emotions than she could sort. They washed over her and she held onto him tightly so she wouldn’t drown in them.

“B’sides,” he murmured, tracing his fingers lightly down her spine, reaching lower and lower until he could caress her smoldering ass, “a backside as fine as this one is pretty much askin’ to be spanked every now and then. Especially since it’s attached to such a wild child. Those kinda girls are the ones who’ve gotta be spanked the most.”

She giggled and straightened up, daring to look at him now. She sniffled and grinned and wiped the tears away again. Sitting in his lap like this gave her a nice boost. They were face to face. No need to crane her neck to gaze up at him the way she usually did.

She looked at him and he at her and neither said anything.

They kissed instead and it lasted almost forever.

**. . .**

She was still naked. He was still hard.

The guns were cleaned and oiled. The sky was almost dark. Somewhere on the other side of the ring of hills, the orange and red of the sunset had receded to purples and blues. Ellie idly wondered if her butt was bruised.

_So what if it is? Totally worth it. I’m came so hard I almost lost my damn mind._

_Fuck. I’m still kind of horny from it._

_But no more spankings tonight. Or for a while, really. My poor butt is going to be sore for a month, I bet._

She grinned to herself as Joel worked another round into one of the spare magazines for his pistol.

_He’s got such a boner right now! Look at it! He’s gotta need to cum, right? Boner’s aren’t for show._

Her aching butt was bothering her again. She couldn’t seem to get comfortable. She wiggled in place a little in the chair beside his.

“Ouch,” she grunted.

“Hurts?” he chided gently.

“Hurts just right,” she snickered. “Perv.”

“Behave yourself and you won’t get another one for a while,” he mock-warned, dropping the loaded magazine into the ammo pouch on his pack.

“I’m always good!” she protested, nudging him in the ribs with an elbow. “You’re the one who beats me and won’t let me wear clothes. You’re like a caveman or something, you jerk. This is going into my report when we get to the Fireflies, you know. Random, senseless beatings. That’s what I’m going to tell them. It won’t look good on your next job interview, Joel.”

“Talk like that will get you another spankin’, girl.”

She giggled and sat there prettily, watching as he zipped up the various pockets and pouches of his pack. They would be ready to hit the road tomorrow, washed up and well rested. But she wanted more of him tonight, and she didn’t want to be selfish about it. Ellie was a helper, after all.

“What about you?” she asked tentatively, taking a chance. “I feel like I should do _something_ for you. I’m getting all the attention here tonight.”

“You runnin’ around without a stitch on today had done plenty for me,” he chuckled.

“Pfft. You say that like I’m not skinny and flat-chested and shit,” she needled sweetly.

He reached over and bounced one of her small breasts playfully in his hand.

“Don’t feel flat-chested to me, girl.”

She giggled and blushed, which surprised her. She’d been nude since they’d made camp hours ago, but now she suddenly felt somehow even more naked. He gave her nipple a firm pinch and she squealed endearingly, slapping at his hand, but not wanting him to let go. When he did, she followed him with adoring eyes as he got up and began to put the last of their things away. Mess kits, towels, clothes, guns, water. All packed up and ready to go. No food. That would be an issue but they were going to sleep with full bellies tonight and sometimes you had to focus on what you had at the moment and let tomorrow sort itself out however it was going to when the time came.

He laid his big revolver on the headboard of the bed, within easy reach. She trotted over and laid her compact pistol next to his. She knew they would be sharing that bed soon and her heart raced at the thought of it. At his side, standing near the bed, she felt the warmth between them and didn’t mind that clothing was something she hadn’t been allowed to wear today. It might be cooling off outside, but not in here.

The stones near the foot of the bed radiated a wonderful warmth, making the little cabin a very cozy place as the sky outside darkened. She watched as Joel double-checked the lock on the door. They were safe and sound inside now. Time for bed.

_Now, boo. It’s gotta be now._

Ellie sidled up to Joel and placed her hand on his bare stomach, just above the waistband of his jeans. He stiffened a little at her touch. He was noticeably erect inside his pants and she was unashamedly naked and so very, very close to him. The warmth from her bare skin was exquisite to him as she stood so close. She leaned against his arm, brushing her cheek against the muscles there. She purred.

“Ellie,” he began, turning to face her. He put his hands on her shoulders, trying to slow her down, but she dropped down to one knee and began to unbutton his pants. He repeated hoarsely, “Ellie.”

“Shh,” she said, working the button loose and beginning to tug the zipper down. She was on both knees now. “Let me do this, Joel.”

The girl worked his cock free of the confines of his jeans, easing him out with small, eager fingers. He was hard. It seemed to him that he had been hard all day. It was a relief to be in her hands, able to grow fully erect in the warm air of the shack. Her eyes took in every detail and she made a soft, cooing sound of approval.

He knew he should tell her to stop.

She nuzzled it. Kissed it.

He knew he should push her away.

The wet, pink tip of her tongue slid out and licked it.

He knew he needed to do something, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

The lips of her plump mouth wrapped around the head, warm and inviting. She worked it into her mouth, just a little. He groaned. His balls pulled up towards his body. Her hair was soft and silky under his hands. She exhaled through her nose, sighing happily, the hot air from her lungs making a pleasant breeze along the top of his shaft.

“Jesus, Ellie,” he muttered. She looked up at him, the head of his cock in her mouth, her face lovely and desirous, her eyes shimmering and devoted. He exhaled slowly, feeling the lust rising up from the cradle of her mouth, overwhelming any decency left inside whatever tattered ribbons remained of his soul. “Christ.”

_Remember what Cherry told you: Treat his dick like it’s exactly what you asked Santa to bring you for Christmas._

She suckled it, working her fingers around it, feeling how hard and big he was. She held it with both hands and inched it out of her mouth. She licked it, swirling her tongue around it like it was a candy she meant to savor for as long as she could. Riley had been able to make a candy cane last all day, she remembered. Ellie, conversely, had rarely been able to resist the urge to bite into suckers and peppermint sticks and chew them as quickly as she could, too impatient to make them last.

_No! Get that thought out of your head! Don’t chew, boo. Whatever you do, don’t chew._

Ellie giggled. Joel tensed at the sound.

_Be cool, dumbass!_

“I can’t believe you’re letting me do this,” she said, covering her mental slip.

“Maybe we better not,” Joel husked, his fingers in her hair.

She slid it into her mouth again, quickly, before he could change his mind. She worked it in as deeply as she could.

“Fuck,” he hissed.

_Just do what Riley did._

Ellie had snuck up to the roof of the dormitory at night, more than once to spy on Riley and her boyfriend, Montego during their brief relationship. Riley had never known that Ellie was hiding behind one of the old, broken air conditioner units, watching in the darkness, curious to see why the older girl found the teenage boy to be so much more interesting company than her young, devoted roommate. Riley was happy to do things for Montego. At the time, Ellie didn’t quite get why Riley would want to do some of the things she did for Montego, but it made sense to her now.

_Wow. Having a man’s dick in her mouth can make a woman feel kind of powerful.  
_

“God almighty, girl,” Joel grunted through his teeth.

She moaned adoringly and tried to work him in and out of her mouth like she’d done this sort of thing a thousand times before. Cherry Jackson had taught her and Riley the basics by using hotdogs from the kitchen refrigerator. Joel was bigger than a hotdog, and much warmer than those salty lengths of meat Cherry had pulled from the cooler. It wasn’t as easy to get him into her mouth, but it was a lot more fun to try.

_Half? Maybe half of him? Or maybe more than that?_

It was hard to judge but she had quite a bit of him in her mouth and she was working a little more of it in there with each bob of her head.

“Ellie,” he whispered. “Fuck that feels good.”

“Mmmm hmmm,” she said, her mouth full.

She worked at it until her jaw began to protest. He hadn’t come yet. She’d expected it would happen quickly. Riley always got Montego there in just a minute or two. Refusing to admit defeat, she nonetheless permitted herself a tactical retreat and slowly, one wet stroke at a time, eased him out of her mouth. She kissed it. Licked it. Never stopped stroking it, using both hands. He was looking down at her, watching the way her little tits swayed side to side as she put her shoulders into the task. The curves of her ass were visible from his vantage point too. Were they still a little pink from the earlier spanking? Or was he only imagining that? Her eyes remained locked on his cock and he half-remembered that silly cartoon he had seen as a kid about the kid living in the jungle who got hypnotized by a snake.

“Joel?”

“Yeah?”

“This thing is sooooo awesome.”

He said nothing but he smiled approvingly and stroked her head with one big hand as she studied the veins that had risen up along the length of him, just beneath the surface. She had never seen him so hard before. She knew that she had made him that way. She had made him so hard. She had turned him on and it made her feel… sexy.

_Thank you, Cherry. I owe you. I’m sorry I thought you were kind of a slut._

“Can I keep going?” she asked, never looking up, still mesmerized by his throbbing cock, pulsing and radiating heat in her hands. “I gonna stay down here a while… if that’s okay.”

She grinned slyly without looking up at him, her eyes on the thing in her hands, a tempting, naked little nymph.

“You take all the time you want, gorgeous.”

“I like it when you call me that,” she cooed and licked his cock head with slow, lavish strokes of her tongue, losing herself again in rapturous devotion. He groaned and when he couldn’t take the teasing any longer, he guided her head towards it. She giggled triumphantly and let him in, wrapping her lips around it, pulling an impressive amount of him into her eager, waiting mouth.

“Christ, Ellie,” he groaned, his hands on her head, feeling how she let him guide her in her task, so eager to please, so eager to do a good job, like always. “I need this so bad.”

_I love that you need me. I love that you think I’m beautiful. I love how you make me feel._

A long, deep groan rumbled up out of Joel and his body shuddered a little, just enough for her to feel ripple through the cock filling her mouth. Her jaw ached but she wasn’t ready to give up yet.

“Jesus, that’s good,” he said hoarsely. Just the head of his cock was in her mouth now, but her tongue was swirling around and around it. The fingers of one small hand were wrapped around the shaft, stroking it gently. The other hand cupped his balls, cradling them protectively, her thumb exploring the shape of them tenderly. “Fuck.”

I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She’s just a damn kid.

She sighed happily, sucking him deeper and deeper, a little at a time. One inch in her mouth, then two… three…

She’s a kid that loves having a cock in her mouth, he heard a voice at the back of his mind whisper to him. A girl that loves to suck cock? You don’t let a girl like that get away.

He knew that voice. It had been whispering things to him about this girl since that night in the Motel 6.

Both of her hands were busy with the hard thing she held. His balls were swinging loose now, heavy and swollen, full and ready to erupt. She was enthusiastic, but not particularly skillful yet. Tess would have gotten him there by now, especially after the way he had spent the day horny and ready to fuck. But Ellie needed more practice. She was practically worshiping his cock, and she was a quick study, but she was still too new at this. He groaned, wanting to come, cock throbbing, balls aching, but not close enough to trigger an orgasm.

_C’mon, boo! You can do it! Work it! Suck it! C’mon!_

_I’m trying!_

She redoubled her effort, stroking, sucking, moving her head faster. She was determined to get all of it in her mouth this time, but it was just too big.

_Fuck. My jaw is going to lock up in a minute. Why the fuck isn’t he coming?_

With a sigh of defeat, she let him slip out again. She held it firmly in both hands and finally looked up at him, the spell broken.

“I can’t get all of it in my mouth, Joel. I’m afraid if I try to push it any deeper… well... I don’t wanna puke on it…er, on you… You know?” She smiled sheepishly, her fingers still wrapped possessively around it, not wanting him to get away but at something of an impasse. “Are you close to… finishing?”

His fingers pushed her hair aside so that he could see her better and he smiled down at her in a way that made her smile too.

“You’re doin’ a real good job, Ellie,” he nodded slowly, his voice a little strained. “But I ain’t quite there yet.”

“Well, fuck,” she groused and he tried not to smile at how cutely disappointed she was with herself. “What else can I do? I’m new at this. Give me some tips.”

“Why don’t I sit down on the bed over there,” he began, reaching down to help her up – she kept one hand on his cock, just in case he was making any plans on trying to get away from her. He stroked her cheek affectionately as he continued, “and you get the baby oil out of my bag. How’s that sound?”

She smiled widely, eyes shining, guessing his plan, and scampered across the room, his eyes on her cute, shapely ass with every excited step she took. He kicked off his jeans. She opened the pouch and pulled out the small bottle. She turned and held it up for him to see, beaming a smile, and he nodded. She giggled wickedly, feeling somehow like both a good girl and a naughty girl at the same time, and came back to him in a hurry. She noticed how his eyes took in all of her naked body as she returned to her place, kneeling between his legs where he had settled in on the edge of the bed.

“So,” she started smoothly, feigning a confidence she didn’t quite feel, turning the bottle over and over in her nervous hands, “you want me to, you know… jack you off. Right?”

She was pleased at the silky smooth way she got the last three words out without her voice hitching or stammering.

“Yeah. I’m thinkin’ that might be easier for a beginner.”

“Pfft. I’m gonna be a pro at this stuff in no time. You’ll see,” she grinned, opening the flip-top of the bottle with her thumbnail. “But I’ll play along tonight. Just promise me you’ll let me take another swing at the blowjob thing later. Deal?”

Jesus Christ, you sick old fucker, he thought to himself. What are you doing? Stop this shit before it goes any farther.

“Deal,” he heard himself say.

His cock stood straight out from his body, rock hard and ready for her. She grinned.

“Hey!” she gushed, an idea coming to her as she poured the clear, aromatic oil into one cupped palm, “Next time, we can sixty-nine. Okay?”

“Sounds good.”

“Cool. I hear that’s pretty fun. Have you ever sixty-nined before?”

“Have you?” His voice was gentle, teasing. He brushed her hair out of the way. He wanted to play with her tits a little but they were just out of reach.

“No,” she giggled, grinning, biting her bottom lip, working the oil around the inside of one hand with the fingers of another. “But it sounds fun.”

“It is,” he said.

“Okay,” she nodded, holding her greasy palms up so he could see them. “Get ready, dude. Here we go.”

She wrapped her fingers around him and he shuddered a bit. He needed to come desperately. The pressure inside his cock had built to tremendous levels and his balls hurt. He wanted Ellie to get him off. He wanted to spray his load all over her tits or her face. He wanted to spray it inside her mouth or across her sweet ass. She began to stroke his cock and he caressed her cheek with the back of his knuckles. She glanced up at him, smiled, and quickly returned her eyes to the pulsing, hard member wrapped up in the loving cage of her slick hands.

Joel grunted as she stroked him. The girl set a quick pace right from the start, at first using her right hand and then her left and for a while, both, then back to one. He wanted to tell her to slow down, to not rush things, to let him enjoy it for as long as possible but he was ashamed that he was letting her do this at all and figured it was for the best that he just be done with it. He couldn’t ask her to stop. His cock wouldn’t let him. She wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. She wanted this as much as he did. She didn’t know any better. He didn’t have that excuse.

I’m going to fuck you if I don’t get rid of you, girl, he thought. I’m going to fuck you good and hard every night. I’m going to fuck you in every hole and in every way. I’m going to hell anyway. Why not, right? You want me to. And I want you. I keep telling myself that it’s a sickness on my part. That it’s just lust… but it’s not… it’s more… I want to fuck you… and I want to keep you around… and I’m gonna ruin your life before it’s even got started if I don’t get rid of you soon… I can’t keep you around no matter how much you love my cock… no matter how much my cock loves you… no matter how much I lo-

Her words broke into his thoughts, distracting him, much to his relief.

“This is so fucking cool,” she said in a hushed tone, thrilled almost to the point of awed silence. Almost.

“y-yeah,” he wheezed, so close to the edge that the world was blurring around the edges. His entire universe was the girl. The girl and his cock. The girl’s hands, both wrapped around him. Merging. Blending. Fusing. She was pumping. Or was he thrusting? He couldn’t tell. Her teeth shone in the light of the water lamp on the table. Her red hair shrouded her green eyes, her freckled cheeks, the purple head of his cock, the arcs of electricity that must surely be arcing across it.

“Come on,” she whispered to either his cock or her hands, he couldn’t be sure which. “Come on. _Come on_. I wanna see it.”

“god”

“Oh man.”

“christ”

“Joel…”

“ungh”

“Hurry…”

“i am”

“I want you to.”

“i…”

“I want to.”

“… i…”

“ _Come on, Jo_ -“

He jerked, his whole body shuddering, all at once. He cried out, went tense, stiff. He gasped through gritted teeth. Her greasy hands flew up and down his pulsating cock and she felt it suddenly swell in her grip. Something burst from it, shooting up into the air. White strings of dense liquid, but not a single gush, spurts of the stuff instead, pumping out of him, one after another, launching from the swollen, purple head of his spasming cock, squirting, shooting, flying, the first few sailing highest into the air, and each one after those growing progressively weaker, falling back to the world a little sooner than the one that had preceded it, going only a little higher than the one that would follow it.

“Holy cow,” she peeped, so softly that he didn’t hear her.

“ellie!” he rasped, pushing his hips towards her, trying to get all of his cock into the loving grip of her wonderful, amazing, perfect little hands.

She blinked, enraptured by the sight of his ejaculation. She knew this was what men did but she had somehow expected it to be… different… less dramatic… less vulnerable.

“fuck,” he wheezed, groaned, strained.

“Shit!” she exclaimed, suddenly aware that she had stopped stroking him, cursing herself for being such an inconsiderate little shit at a time like this. He always worked her pussy like a pro, taking all the way through her orgasm, start to finish, not stopping his magic fingers until he’d coaxed ever orgasmic tingle out of her body that he could. And here she sat with her mouth open, doing nothing, just watching him like a goober. She grimaced determinedly, squeezed his twitching, jutting dick tightly, and began to pump him as hard and fast as she could, trying to make this moment as awesome as she could for him.

“oh god!!” he wailed, small, sharp pieces of gravel in his voice.

“Go, Joel! Go!” she exclaimed encouragingly, almost hissing the words through her teeth, clamped tightly together, like his. “I want you to cum hard, dude!”

“UNGH!” he cried, his ass coming up from the mattress, his shoulders digging into the blankets as his body levered up towards her, his back arched like a bridge over the sea of blankets.

She willed her hands to move at a blur, jerking his cock furiously, trying to get all of his juice out. His hands fumbled clumsily with hers, trying to cover them, trying to press down on them, trying to stop them. He was ejaculating still, but much less powerfully than before for some reason, thick dollops of the stuff flying into the air more from the motion of her frantic hands than from anything his dick was doing, which was not what she expected but maybe that’s how it was with guys. Maybe. Who knew. She was still new at this stuff. He was making a crazy, wild, sexy, desperate sound.

“Yeah! There you go! Harder!” she cheered.

“e-ellie” he groaned, trying to sit up but failing at it, his hands flapping at hers, lacking any coordination. “s-stop”

“Wha?” Ellie said, looking up, bringing her actions to a quick stop. Thick semen coated her hands, ran across her knuckles, pooled on his belly, matted his pubic hair. A little bit of it had landed in her bangs without her noticing until that moment. She blinked. “What’s wrong?”

He said nothing. He only gasped and groaned, tried to get air in his lungs.

“Joel?” A small voice. Uncertain.

“j-just…” he panted, breathless, his hands resting heavily on hers, his body heavy and limp. He couldn’t catch his breath. “just hold up a m-minute… alright?”

“Sure,” she said, a little confused. He lay there, gasping, sweating, growing soft in her hands. She studied him. “Did… Did I do okay?”

“did great” he wheezed and lay there in silence for a few moments, his belly rising and falling, sweat making a damp tangle of his chest hair. His balls were killing him. His cock was in agony. He hadn’t come so hard in ages and he hadn’t shot a load that big since he was a teenager. He wondered if he had pulled a muscle inside his groin. His cock was begging him for mercy, already paying the price for underestimating the girl and her crazy need to please, her boundless desire to do a good job for him. All the signs were there from the start. Why hadn’t his cock listened to him?

She kept still and quiet, only working up the nerve to play with his soft cock after several long moments. She flopped it around playfully, waggling it this way and that. She began to hum softly, a song he didn’t know, but a happy, lively sound. His scrotum relaxed and his balls began to descend. She tickled them with the fingers of a free hand as they worked their way down to hang in front of the crack of his ass.

“It’s so cool the way they do that,” she said cheerfully, happily, clearly in love. She wiggled his cock around some more, making a toy of it. She wouldn’t let go. She swung his balls from side to side, cradled in the shelf of her curled fingers.

He chuckled and rubbed his fingers along the sides of her semen-coated hands as she fondled him.

“Can’t get enough of that thing, can you, wild child?”

She giggled, relieved. He wasn’t mad. Everything was going to be okay.

“Maybe it’s your thing who can’t get enough of my hands,” she tittered, stroking and squeezing him, getting every drop out, fascinated by the part of him that she held and the power she was just beginning to realize that she had over him so long as she held it. She traced a thumb around the underside of the soft, velvety head, marveling at the way it slowly returned to a less swollen, less purple shade of normal.

“Might be that you’re right,” he groaned happily, folding his hands across his chest, content to let her amuse herself with his sore, defeated cock. It had surrendered to her unconditionally.

She grinned in amazement as she watched it shrink in her hand. He sounded sleepy to her. His eyes were closed.

She held him fast with one hand and ran the forefinger of the other through the cooling pool on his stomach. Through one slitted eye, he watched her lick a little of it off her fingertip. She made a face. Not disgust, but not what she was expecting either.

“You know,” she offered pleasantly, making the best of it, “this isn’t too bad. I expected it to be… I don’t know… saltier, I guess.”

He chuckled. “You know not to get that stuff anywhere near your pussy, right?”

“Duh,” she snarked. “You mean babies don’t come from storks?”

He chuckled and groaned, stretched.

She continued, “And _you’re_ the one who squirted this mess all over the place, not me.”

“Shush,” he yawned.

“Ready for another one?” she asked hopefully.

“I’ll pass,” he groaned.

“C’mon, Joel. Nobody likes a quitter,” she urged, tickling his cock with her fingernails. “One more! C’mon. I’ll do an even better job this time. You’ll see.”

“Don’t want to wear you out, girl.”

She blew a raspberry at him and finally released him, standing up as she did so. Placing one knee on the bed, she leaned down over him and kissed him. He returned it, sneaking a peek at her breasts, swaying there like ripe fruit above him, as she finally let their mouths part.

“Don’t go anywhere, you pervert,” she purred, having caught him looking at her tits. “I’m gonna get a towel and clean you up.”

“Fine idea,” he sighed, his voice heavy and slow.

“Two towels,” she giggled, tracing a finger through the congealing puddle on his belly. “Messy bastard.”

He smiled and enjoyed a good, long look at her bare ass while she stood at the table and dug a few of the red shop towels from his pack. She turned and his gaze naturally fell across the dark red triangle of her bush.

“Perv,” she giggled, standing there for a minute, happy to let him look and then trotted over to him, beautiful and naked, and feeling very sexy.

**. . .**

“We are only sleeping naked from now on,” Ellie sighed happily, spooning with him, his arm snug around her belly, warm beneath the quilts in the cool, blue darkness of the little cabin.

“Only when we have a locked door between us and the world,” he murmured. He wanted to sleep. She wanted to talk. He had decided three minutes ago that he would give her five minutes, tops, and then he was going to sleep, even if she was in mid-sentence.

“What about the sex and stuff? Same deal?” she asked.

“Same deal,” he spoke quietly against the back of her neck.

“What if we’re, like, someplace safe? You know? Someplace where nobody can get to us. Like a tree house? Or barn? In the sleeping bag, up in a loft or something?”

“No lock on the door, no foolin’ around,” he mumbled, barely hanging on to consciousness. “Them’s the rules.”

“Ugh,” she sighed unhappily. She wanted to do this new stuff with him all the time, every day from now on, and she said so.

He didn’t reply. He was asleep.

She smiled, yawned, and wiggled back against him, trying to press every inch of them of them together.

 

* * *

 

She didn’t know he was thinking about Tommy. And her, too. They walked along, the morning air damp, their bellies empty, her thoughts on the glorious green mountain wonderland around them, his thoughts on things less magical.

What if, he wondered. What if she says something? What if she tells Tommy or anybody his brother is holed up with in Jackson about the stuff I’ve gotten up to with the girl these last few weeks? The girl talks non-stop once she’s comfortable around people, which never takes her long. She’ll say something, probably innocently enough, not meaning anything by it, and everybody will know what I’ve done. The other folks can piss up a rope, but I don’t want Tommy knowing what kind of man I’ve become. Doing something to survive, that’s one thing, no matter how terrible it might have been. But fucking a kid? Or almost a kid. And maybe not really fucking, exactly, but close enough. Whatever you call it, it’s more than a man as old as I am should be doing with a girl her age. She’s too young to know better but I don’t have that excuse and Tommy’s a lot of things, but he’s always been a decent man at heart. Too decent sometimes. Younger brother or not, no way Tommy’ll let slide what I’ve done to this naïve girl. It’s not her fault she’s so damn trusting. How can I tell Tommy? What can I say? That there’s something about her? That she’s really mature for her age? That she’s tough and trustworthy and she loves looking at my cock? Loves touching it? Loves being touched? Loves touching herself for you? That she’d do just about anything you ask to please you? She’s a damn orphan and the world’s done nothing but shit on her from day one and she’s still holding out hope that life might be better somewhere and you just have to keep trying and all that other shit she says when you give her a chance to share her thoughts on a world she doesn’t know the first goddamn thing about. She’s sweet. And pretty. And smart. And funny, not that I try to encourage that part of her too much, just because when she gets on a roll with those jokes it reminds me of Matt Keller and all those dumb jokes he used to tell the group when we were gathered around Miguel Cortez’s old truck, eating the food he and Jerry Pollard had brought in from the kitchens of the MSZ. Cassie had cooked most of that food. She listened to that fuzzy old 70s arena rock and hummed along, turning any kind of ingredients into something edible. We all would have had a much harder time at La Grange without her and her magic spoons. Life had been good there. That was one of the few things me and Tommy could still agree on back in Boston, just before little brother lit out for a place that he was supposed to keep secret from everybody who wasn’t a part of the expedition. If FEDRA had caught wind, they would’ve tore the outskirts apart to the group from leaving. If the Fireflies had heard about it, they would asked to tag along. Asked in that way that means you can only give them one kind of answer. Once the hard work of setting the place up was done, the Firefly helpers would’ve taken over. They would’ve fucked it up too, just like they fucked up everything they’ve had a hand in. Too many people dead nowadays because of those idiots, no matter how good their intentions may have been to start with. They’re all thugs now. Tommy had called me a thug when he cut ties with me to join the Fireflies. But pretty soon, baby brother realized they weren’t any better than our old crew had been. Hell, at least I’ve always been honest about what I am and what I did. I never dressed it up in fancy ideals and big speeches. Power is power, and control is control. The Fireflies keep trying to control more than they’ve got the brains or muscle to handle. I made the same mistake. I can admit that now. I was too quick to leave La Grange. Tommy and us had been good there. Matt and Cassie and Don and all the rest too. When the power went out, as it did all the time near the end, Matt always had a few jokes ready. Alexa always laughed at them. She died in Memphis, caught by one scared soldier in the middle of the night. Matt had died at night too, in Houston, under the guns of a squad of soldiers patrolling the QZ alleys after curfew. He’d gone down fighting, spraying fire from every gun he carried, which was always a sizeable amount, buying time for Tommy and Enzo to get away. A lot like Ellie, with all his goofy jokes and strange observations of the world. Matt was brave as hell. He faced his end on the streets of Houston without complaint. Or so Tommy said. I wasn’t there that night. I was in a different part of town, outside the walls, working a different deal with the new guy in the group, Big Matt. Him and the rest of the best muscle our group had: Landeros, Craig, Hector, and Larry. That particular deal was supposed to be the risky one, but it had gone off without a hitch. Tommy and Original Matt thought they had lucked out and gotten the cakewalk job. But it didn’t work out the way it was supposed too, and our best scrounger and the original leader of the group died and took his jokes with him Cassie had died in Houston too, her throat sliced through, all the way to spine, by a rival group of smugglers trying to send a message to me and my people that new sellers weren’t welcome in the black markets of Houston. Me and the crew killed every single one of those fuckers in one godawful bloody night, even the last few who begged and pleaded and swore they would leave Houston and never come back, even that one boy who couldn’t have been no more than twelve or thirteen and pissed his pants right before Landeros shot him in the stomach and left him screaming and howling, making such a godawful noise that Nicki put two rounds in the boy’s head just to put an end to it. Dead, all of them, every single one. And not just the rival smugglers who killed a nice, middle-aged lady to make a point, but the people who followed me too. It took more than one night, sure, but one by one, everybody who trusted me got buried somewhere along that long, shitty road that stretches from Austin to Boston, and took more then ten years to get to the end of. And Tommy is just about all that’s left. And however he might feel about me and the things we did together to stay alive outside the walls of the QZ’s, surely Tommy is still holding on to some part of the bond we used to have. I know he does. Before telling me that he was done with me for good, Tommy let slip that he was heading west for Jackson, Wyoming with a bunch of starry-eyed idealists that thought they were going to rebuild this godforsaken world one stupid fucking little piece at a time. Was it an accident, when he let it slip like that? Or did he put it out there on purpose, leaving the door open just a crack? Just in case? And here I am, ready to come waltzing in after all these years, a teenage girl at my side, like nothing was nothing and by the way she’s immune and, oh yeah, she’s been playing with my cock every chance I give her but that’s cool right because it’s about time for a family reunion and by the way does anybody know the way to the nearest Firefly secret base? Vic had killed Phil for putting his hands on a little girl we found scraping by in the ruins of a K-Mart down in Georgia. Vic had left Phil screaming on the side of the road with his dick shot off. Tommy had nodded before climbing into Cody’s SUV, the one with the park ranger decals still on the door. Tommy didn’t like leaving folks to suffer. He was about to shoot that kid in Houston out of mercy, but Nicki had pulled her trigger first. But Tommy was happy to leave Phil like that. Baby brother can’t abide anyone who would hurt a child. What’s he going to say when I come strolling into his camp with a young redhead girl who’s learning to jerk cock like a pro? No. There ain’t no other choice but to make the handoff as quick as possible. Get the girl pawned off on Tommy and get out of there. Sell Tommy on that ‘save the world’ bullshit that he believes so much in. Get him to take the girl and then get the hell away. I need to be long gone by the time Ellie starts asking questions and saying stuff that’ll tip Tommy off about what’s gone down between me and her. It’ll be too late by then. Tommy will have a cause. Ellie will have a protector. And I can go find a deep hole somewhere and stop making things worse for everyone. There just ain’t any other way -

“Jackson County,” the girl spoke, her words pulling Joel up from his quiet despair.

He looked. He realized that his eyes had been on the grass in front of his boots. The woods around him had ceased to exist for a dangerous while, leaving him oblivious to anything but the shit going on inside his own head. Dangerous to drift like that. This girl was always bringing up the old, buried garbage inside him, like his soul was trying to cleanse itself, as though such thing would even be possible. Some stains would never come out.

There was an old, fancy, wooden sign there, butting up against a large tree that had grown in the twenty years since the tree was a sapling and the sign had been placed there by the Wyoming Park Commission. The truck of the tree would one day soon grow big enough to push the sign over for good. There was a sheer drop off on the other side of the tree, and an old, rotting wooden fence, the kind made to look as authentically old-timey as possible for the benefit of the tourists. What was left of the ramshackle safety fence was vainly trying to offer some meager measure of protection for anyone foolish enough to get close to the edge of the cliff. The grass was tall here, slick with the light morning rain. He didn’t like Ellie being anywhere near that edge. He wanted her to be safe but there wasn’t any such thing in this world. Maybe there never had been. Maybe it had all been a lie people had agreed to believe until the lie was too big to ignore and most of the people were gone.

She was approaching the sign and its companion tree, wearing her bright, three color windbreaker. The hood was down, of course. He was going to have to staple it to her head to get her to wear it, it seemed. She stopped next to the sign, turning to face him as she swept a small hand in the approximate direction of the battered, weather-beaten relic. He scanned the cracked remains of the once neatly painted white letters stretching across the face of the fading, green-enameled wood.

          JACKSON COUNTY  
           Snake River Trail

She was smiling a little, but it was clear that she was a feeling the first bite of the day’s fatigue. She was getting weary. They both were. She was breathing a bit harder than usual. The going this morning hadn’t been too difficult, compared to some of the shit they’d seen since leaving Boston. The nature hike trail here was fading, slowly being reclaimed by the forest, but every step had been uphill for the last mile or so. She pulled air into her lungs, trying to refresh her muscles, and the sound of it reminded him of the way she breathed hard and fast before she came. An image of her, naked, sweating, panting, flitted across his mind. He could feel her against him, petite, writhing, groaning, her bare skin slick and hot, her young body wanting to come, trusting him to get her there, eager to climax, ready to make a wonderful noise, as much for him as for herself. She was discovering that being pleased by him was also pleasing to him – the benefits of having an older lover. He wasn’t selfish, as he had sometimes been as a young man. He enjoyed making her come and she enjoyed coming for him. His cock began to shift about in his jeans as he walked, wanting to come to life, even though it was more tired today than normal. She’d coaxed an orgasm out of him last night. She’d done it again this morning before they’d left the shack, beaming a smile while she worked, making him come even faster this time, her fingers slick and eager and fast learners. He’d come almost as hard as he had the night before, pumping out a surprising volume of fluid. His balls ached even now from the exertion. But sore or not, he wanted her to wrap her fingers around him again. Already three times since breakfast she had said she couldn’t wait to make camp tonight. It wasn’t even ten in the morning yet and it was clear that she was looking forward to being in his arms… having his hands on her body… his lips on her breasts… his fingers inside her wet pussy… his hard cock in her hand. She had looked back at him at least once or twice every twenty minutes as she walked up the hill, an impish smile on her lovely, elfin face, her ass and hips swaying appealingly as she made sure to stay directly in his line of sigh. She had just a little more wiggle in her walk than usual. She rubbed her hands on her butt or the backs of her thighs from time to time, pretending to clean them, secretly showing herself off to him. She was thinking dirty thoughts. She couldn’t hide it. She didn’t try. She’d had a taste of the adult world and she wanted more. He’d had a taste of her too: the wet richness of her mouth, the salty sweat of her breasts, the delicious nectar of her virginal honey pot licked from her own fingers. He wanted more too. He wanted to taste her pussy. He wanted her to taste his come. He wanted to come in her mouth, on her tits, in the red tangle of her pubic hair. He wanted to splash a hot load across her back, her ass, her face. When he had unloaded this morning, leaning against the wall of the shack while she knelt before him, naked, her small hands lubed up and pumping with delightful abandon, he had splashed several lines of jizz across her small but growing tits, leaving white lines criss-crossing across pale flesh. She had wiped it off with a red shop towel, a smile of satisfaction on her face.

Did you like it, Ellie? he wondered. Do you want to try a little more? I’ll fill your mouth up with it if you want. You suck me off and I’ll give you more come than you’d know what to do with. And you’d do it if I asked you, wouldn’t you? Sure you would. Hell, you’d give up your gorgeous little ass to me if I asked you nicely enough… or spanked you hard enough. God help me, that was the hottest thing I’ve been a part of in I don’t know how long. Tess liked to be tied up sometimes, and she sure liked having her tits slapped and her ass smacked… her face too, if she was in just the right mood. But she never asked me to turn her over my leg and spank her like that. Jesus, girl. You’re more pent up and ready to pop than a damn firecracker. What else do you got in there, hiding inside that head of yours? What else do you want me to do to you? God almighty, I thought Tess could be kinky sometim-

He blinked, willing Tess from his mind. His former partner and lover was gone. Thinking about her wouldn’t bring her back. And all the same, if she were still around, she would hate what he had done to this poor girl.

Last night was so much fun, he remembered Ellie saying, just as they’d found this trail. She was smiling and blushing a little when she said it. She even thanked me for it. Thanked me! Like I did her a goddamn favor or something. She’s so young she don’t even know how wrong it is.

He sighed, disguising it as a long exhale. He was tired of the constant, losing battle between the perverted desires of the sick man he had become, telling him that any man with any sense would fuck the hell out of a girl that wanted to be fucked as badly as the one did, and the quiet voice in the back of his head, the last remnant of whatever was left of the good man he had once been, telling him to do what was right.

It’s gonna be for her own good, he decided, finally accepting what had to be done, no matter how heavy his heart was going to be on the long, lonely walk back to Boston or wherever he wound up when this was all done.

“That means we’re close to Jackson City, right?” she asked, a second wind coming over her as she waited near the sign patiently, watching him trudge the last few steps towards her.

“Shouldn’t be more than a few miles,” he said.

After all I’ve done to her, giving her up to a good man like Tommy is the only way to do right by her now, he reminded himself. The only way.

She smiled, a fresh question on her lips. She always had questions for him. She always had smiles too, especially now.

Gonna miss you, Ellie, he thought. You got no damn idea how much.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Joe’s answer to Ellie’s about to be asked question? “I don’t know what I’m feeling.” I love that line. It’s a very Joel thing to say. The man hates himself, I think. In both the game and my version of the story, I believe Joel has already decided that he’s going to hand Ellie off to Tommy. I’m convinced that it’s because he believes it’s the right thing to do. When he later tells her that she’ll be even safer with Tommy, I think he really believes that. What is he so afraid of? Love. Joel is terrified of loving somebody. That’s what kept him and Tess at arm’s length, I think. Loving makes losing that much harder so it’s easier for Joel not to love.
> 
> The FEDRA newspaper, ‘The American Sentinel’ was fist mentioned in chapter six of this volume. It never came up since then, but I imagine Ellie read that old paper backwards and forwards. The paper was propaganda for a people desperate for hope in a world ending all around them. The education Ellie got at the school, years after the outbreak, would have been a different, even more sanitized propaganda. As skewed as the information in the paper would have been, it would still be more accurate than anything she was taught by the instructors.
> 
> Sue’s Fantasy Club is a real brothel in Nevada. I’ve never been but I have a souvenir. Weird the things our relatives save as private mementos only for a younger relative to find as we’re sorting their estate after they die. Did granddad come by this as a customer? Or did he pick it up somewhere else as a knick-knack? I have no idea. I wonder what I’m going to leave behind, forgotten at the bottom of a box in the attic, for a nephew or niece to find after I’ve kicked the bucket? I hope it’s a nice recipe book and not some creepy porn. Ah, who am I kidding? It’s gonna be porn. ;-)
> 
> Maxwell House doesn’t actually make French vanilla cappuccino. They make French vanilla café (coffee), which is sort of similar but I figured Ellie would be familiar with the word café, so I went for ‘cappuccino’ instead, just to make her sound it out long enough for Joel to get excited. I prefer Tim Horton’s coffee, myself. I’m not much for the fancy, milky, sugary Starbucks stuff – too much like desert and not enough like old-fashioned classic American greasy diner coffee. In my head, Joel is secretly a fan of frou-frou coffee. Café mocha with skim milk, whipped cream, and chocolate sprinkles. But only when Tommy’s not around. (Might as well get a milkshake, if you ask me)
> 
> And so, with Ellie and Joel out of soap, out of food, and at the beginning of the Fall chapter, it’s time to bring this volume to a close. A couple of one-shots are just ahead and the smaller volume three after that. But in the meantime, I’m going to take a couple of weeks off before coming back to this world. I’ll have the next part of the story up in June. Until then, I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this volume, the largest of the set.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> p.s. I see that my inbox has really piled up these last couple of weeks. I don’t have time to answer them all tonight, but I’ll get to them as soon as I can.


End file.
